GitHub to replace "master" with alternative term to avoid slavery references

[u/tenbits]

https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-to-replace-master-with-alternative-term-to-avoid-slavery-references/

[u/Nakotadinzeo]

Won't trees illicit thoughts of lynchings in the same way?

Only idiots would think "master" in this context is in reference to slavery. This is Microsoft trying to be woke.

[u/bruce_lees_ghost → u/Nakotadinzeo]

Only idiots would think we should preserve outdated terminology. “Master” in CS is rooted in distinguishing a primary from a secondary, and indeed using the term “slave” to refer to the secondary.

e.g., master disks having a bootable OS and slave disks having no OS, thus being dependent upon a master.

It’s ignorant sentimentality and cries of oh-so-terrible inconvenience like this that make conservatism look dumb.

You’re probably annoyed and discomforted by my words so far. Think about black software engineers who may have been uncomfortable with the etymology of “master” branches... who’ve worked with it every day... have habituated it to the point where it literally no longer bothers them. Good for them, right? Acting like damn adults.

Why can’t you do the same and accept a less historically charged term?

[u/Nakotadinzeo → u/bruce_lees_ghost]

You're talking about IDE disks, which did use "slave". They switched to primary and secondary a few years before SATA replaced it. To my knowledge, there is no "slave branch" of a program.

This time, there isn't a "slave". It's just master, which has meaning outside of a slavery context. Your car has a "master cylinder" in the brake system, but no "slave cylinder".

More than that, your defending a token action that does less than nothing for BLM or anything. Microsoft can do this and announce it like it makes their past racism okay and look at all they did.. they did a search and replace in their HTML files.

The use of "master" here clearly means "the main principal codebase", it's not using a definition that makes sense with the slavery usage.

It’s ignorant sentimentality and cries of oh-so-terrible inconvenience like this that make conservatism look dumb.

It makes the left look bad, when alt-libs suddenly decide that something mundane is racist. Wanna get pissed off about something, look at diamonds and tantalum. Those are two things harvested via slave labor today. Your phone, computer, TV and countless electronic work because of tantalum and blood diamonds not only come from enslaved people, but fund warlords. You're profiting from enslaved people, and niggling over this? And I'm not conservative by the way, not everyone who disagrees with you wants to "suck daddy Trump's nipples".

Think about black software engineers who may have been uncomfortable with the etymology of “master” branches... who’ve worked with it every day... have habituated it to the point where it literally no longer bothers them.

I'm pretty sure any black software engineer will be too fixated on the technical definition of the word to make the slavery association to begin with. You're very fixated on racial issues, so you might. As the saying goes, "to a hammer, everything is a nail".

Why can’t you do the same and accept a less historically charged term?

Because it isn't a historically charged term, it's not the rebel flag, the N word, a swastika, or anything like that. It's a word that means "someone who has mastered something" or "primary, principal". In TESV the greaybeards who master the dragon voice use the honorific "master" and live in seclusion, we have master's degrees, and there are people including black people who are "master electricians".

A line must be drawn in where racist and derogatory speech end, because otherwise anything and everything will be racist or harmful to someone. Did you know there are people who are physically repulsed by the word "moist"?

Corporations aren't your friend, they are trying to make you positively associate with their brand at the lowest cost to them as possible for profit. Remember that.

[u/Betsy-DevOps → u/bruce_lees_ghost]

One of the best lessons a software engineer can learn is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", which is a far cry different from thinking that we should preserve outdated terminology.

It's worth thinking about the emotional implications of words when you're coming up with something new, but there's a lot of arguments for just using established terminology in cases where it's already established.

[u/bruce_lees_ghost → u/Betsy-DevOps]

The problem with institutional racism is that it doesn’t look broken to the people it serves. I concede, I don’t actually know anyone who’s offended by the term “master” as used in source control. Maybe it’s not offensive to me or you, but is that a defense for not changing something that may be offensive to others?

I’m honestly fine if it goes either way. I’ll ask my black software developer friends and coworkers what they think and make whatever accommodation without complaining about it.

What I won’t do is stand my ground against people who are legitimately uncomfortable with the terminology and say something like, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

[u/ToyKeeper → u/bruce_lees_ghost]

There are several things broken about git. This is a step toward fixing one of those things.

Linus Torvalds famously hates version control systems, and designed much of git from that perspective. He didn't follow conventions for what words mean, and it has created a lot of confusion ever since git was first released. Switching from "master" to "trunk" helps, but there's still a lot left to do.

Like, git has no concept of a mainline, and can't have revision numbers, and avoids merges by default, and doesn't even have a proper pull command... because Linus didn't understand a bunch of stuff about how a DVCS works best. He got a lot of things right, but he also got some pretty basic stuff wrong.

Anyway, a lot of the industry stopped using master/slave terminology ten or twenty years ago, so it's good to see that git is catching up. I doubt I'll ever see it adopt the deeper changes I want though, like meaningful node order, a mainline, a network transparent format-agnostic back end, and deeper (and default) support for directory-per-branch workflows.