master (n): an original from which copies can be made
Context is pretty important when it comes to words with multiple definitions. I find it hard to interpret the “master branch” as anything but this definition. Now if you’re talking about PATA hard drives, I can understand updating the standard terminology there.
yeah we might know what a ‘slave drive’ is but it sure sounds sketchy lol
Thats not the only definition though. It’s clearly the intended one, but it’s possible to make someone think of other definitions when a word pops up.
And it’s not too hard to go “Oh, I get why alternate definitions might make people uncomfortable, even if I have no issue with it.” And if you can see why someone might be uncomfortable in a situation, and it’s zero effort to avoid that situation… why not?
Unless you’re intentionally trying to not understand, or lack empathy and genuinely can’t understand why words with alternate definitions heavily linked to slavery might make people uncomfortable, it feels pretty self explanatory.
I’ll give Linus a pass, because linux kernel is probably the most widely accessed repo out there, and changing defaults and standards can have an actual impact on third party tooling.
and it’s zero effort to avoid that situation
It usually isn’t, though. Going against a standard causes extra work. If it’s an existing project that already used that “bad word” then you’re proposing a major piece of work to change things around, likely breaking a ton of stuff in the process.
And it’s not too hard to go “Oh, I get why alternate definitions might make people uncomfortable, even if I have no issue with it.”
If you accept the opinion of people that take your words out of context in order to get offended, somebody somewhere will have a problem with every word you can pick in a dictionary to use.
It’s a power play. The people insisting on the change want to exploit the people doing things so that they gain some perceived or real reward. Stop supporting this.
The issue is that no one is taking my words out of context to get offended. No one is getting offended because I said things. They are getting offended because of their own situation, that I just happened to have brought up. If someone in the military had PTSD because someone yelled “Duck!” and then a grenade blew up right near them, so now they have panic attacks anytime they hear someone loudly say duck. That isn’t them “taking the word duck out of context” that is “the word duck affects their brain differently.” No one is saying that using the word master makes you a mean malicious person. No one is accusing you of being on the attack trying to hurt people when you use a word without realizing how it impacts others. If a military vet was like “hey I have severe anxiety when someone says duck, can we say ‘leave early’ instead of ‘duck out early’”. I would be like “oh shit, i didnt realize. my bad, yeah, of course” not “YOURE TAKING MY WORDS OUT OF CONTEXT I HAVE THE RIGHT TO USE THOSE WORDS”. If you know the word hurts others and then you double down and insist on using it, then yeah, you’re on the attack because clearly you don’t care that you are hurting people.
It’s pretty easy to tell a good faith argument most of the time. You don’t need to just blindly accept the opinion of all people. “Hey this word is heavily associated with slavery and makes people think of slavery” is pretty striaghtforward. Thats not a purely bad faith argument.
I don’t know all who you think is “insisting” on the “master/main” change. Everyone I’ve talked to has been like “yeah, if we could that’s cool.” or likened it to more of a “its like if someone reminded you daily of that time you accidentally called the teacher ‘mom’ … having it go away would be nice, but if it doesn’t oh well.” No one is crying over it or making demands. The only “insisting” is just people questioning why the slight suggestion results in so much pushback.
It seems like your only reason to not change is “because someone asked me to and I’m too stubborn and reject any decision that wasn’t my own.” At least “changing a branch name on the worlds largest repo has consequences” is a valid reason. But “I refuse to listen to others”… cmon.
If you know the word hurts others and then you double down and insist on using it, then yeah, you’re on the attack because clearly you don’t care that you are hurting people.
That would be a pretty ok argument, if you wasn’t extending it to all of the internet. But you are, so it becomes “somebody somewhere on the world has a problem with your words, you should adjust or you are a bad person”. And no, that form isn’t reasonable.
It’s also not reasonable if that person that has a problem with “duck” then comes back and say “yeah, and I have a problem with ‘early’ too”, and you change early to something else, and they come back and say “yeah, we have a problem with ‘of’, can you stop that too?”. And it just happens to be the same people raising a lot of other demands on a lot of other contexts, to the point that some people are just leaving the group to avoid them.
I genuinely can’t understand why words with alternate definitions linked to slavery might make people uncomfortable. It unintentionally reminds you bad things in history, and? Should we stop using words like “Nazi” or “War” too? Can we all stop using “death” while we’re at it? It reminds me the mortal nature of human
Because there are words that have less violent associations that can still capture the relationship sought to be described.
[Stop using Nazi, war]
Those aren’t used for computing though. And, yeah, I think if we did we probably should. Like if terms related to genocide were used for stopping a lot of processes at once that would be pretty weird to me.
[death]
Kill is used to refer to stopping processes and that’s probably where the line is in my opinion. It feels very different to me to say “kill a process” versus “genocide a group of processes”
We do use
war. It’s a common package in Java. Should we rename that because it might make people uncomfortable when we say “We are going to deploy the war tomorrow”? Why can’t we just accept the fact that words have multiple meanings?I want to update the web app but war never changes.
hmm… have you tried nuking everything? That might help
@lowleveldata In general, I would say yes, it’s better not to use “Nazi” as a metaphor for otherwise everyday activities where there are plenty of unobjectionable alternatives.
I don’t know that trying to divorce it from context and find a general rule is particularly helpful, though. It’s not just “alternate” definitions, it’s the primary definition for most people that the industry adopted.
@lowleveldata I am fully aware that most who use it regularly probably have recontextualized it by default, but why not be more inclusive to those who might be put off by it when we have perfectly cromuoent another options?
Because that’s a theory that could be applied to any words. We’re catering to some imaginary person (“who might be put off”) so it’s basically devil’s proof.
The meaning is exceedingly clear. Mindless actions ignoring context completely miss the entire point of the exercise, serving only to waste people’s time with virtue signaling.
I in no way oppose changing the standard from “master” to “main” for new repositories, but going back and trying to change things with unknown dependencies is just going to cause more problems than it solves.
I don’t know the history of who started the master/main debate. if it was a bunch of white people trying to show how progressive they were while black programmers were like “yeah, we don’t care”, then it’s virtue signaling. If it was the black programmers being like “this phrase feels weird to us… can we change it?” … then it’s not virtue signalling, it’s listening to underrepresented voices. I legitimately don’t know which scenario it is. I’m also not in a position where the word bothers me at all, but I also have an easy life, and if someone tells me a word used in a certain way feels weird and I can resolve that with 0 effort (ie, switch new projects to main), I will.
And of course about the retroactive changing, which is why I said I wouldn’t expect linux to change.
Me making all my master branches explicitly master because I have a bdsm kink and I can’t believe they wanna take my master branches away from me.
[init] defaultBranch = chaosI’m just waiting for some jerk to start slipping special characters like ß and ę into his branch names now. Not that I wouldn’t applaud him.
Yeah, that seems like a real treat 😒.
I refuse to legitimize this.
I just got annoyed yesterday when git made the default branch master and had to fiddle to push to githubs main
You had this problem probably because you created your repo with the GitHub web UI?
I always create the local repo first with
git init, make at least 1 commit, and thengh repo create. And yes, my default branch would bemasterbut why should I care if I offend some Americans.Speaking as a level headed American, YOU DON’T. PLEASE KEEP DOING THIS.
I personally feel that to anthropomorphize a project is to demean that very historical significance. It would have been better to replace the term “slave” with, say, “dog”. Then everybody woulda been happy, but NoOOoOooOOo…
