So, 'master' was the default branch name. Why is the default changed in 3.0? Is it because of the allusion to slavery in the United States? Even if so, what does a Git branch name has to do with that country's history? Did Git used its branch name to enslave people? When a user does 'git checkout master', are more people getting enslaved - some kind of butterfly effect?
Does it need to be said that if the US had or has a problem, it's they alone who need to deal with it? Since when did the rest of world took upon itself to "solve" their problem? Did we all get green card or something?
I don't feel like this will stop here. What's the next word some people in some other country decided to declare offensive?
Git took the branch name from Bitkeeper which did have "slave" branches and used a "master/slave" analogy. Git didn't also inherit the "slave branch" concept in that same way, but it did have that heritage accidentally imported when git lazily reused that branch name.
> Does it need to be said that if the US had or has a problem, it's they alone who need to deal with it?
Slavery/indentured servitude is a worldwide problem that still exists today in countries that are not the US. Even if you think this is an over-correction in relationship to the historic US Slave Trade specifically, that was a multinational effort involving the British Empire, the Dutch Empire, and many other Former Colonies beyond just the US' involvement. The US took advantage of the trade, but it neither invented the trade nor was the lone slave owning country involved in that trade, nor was it the last country in that trading group to end slavery trading in practice even if it was one of the last ones on paper.
I'm not trying to argue against it, I think "slave" branches make no sense anyway, but to GP's point BitKeeper didn't enslave anybody, just used the word.
If we believe we should remove allusions to negative things why are we ok with "kill", "orphan", "evict", "bash", "cut", "isolate" etc? What is special about that terrible concept that we should stop using the word even when not applied to people at all?
The point of bringing up Bitkeeper is as much because why use a word divorced from its original meaning at all? "master" wasn't an explicit choice by a git maintainer, it was inherited noise. When confronted with where that choice came from, in finding it wasn't a choice but a bad legacy, the git maintainers generally agreed it might be nice to pick something that made more sense as a choice (rather than bullshit noise from a practically dead and gone upstream project) and after much debate "main" made sense as something a lot of people were using anyway.
That's what is "special" about it, that it wasn't special. It wasn't chosen. It was just a stupid inherited default that didn't make sense when questioned.
It was never an intentional allusion to a negative thing, it was accidentally a negative thing causing real people some harm, and it was easier to fix than to justify why it was a negative thing in the first place.
master alone feels somewhat (I disagree personally) non-scary, but consider that master/slave has been used elsewhere in computing: i2c, ide protocols for example. It's just a bad look. It's of no consequences to change, this is easy, simple. Have joy that we improve.
Does it need to be said that if the US had or has a problem, it's they alone who need to deal with it? Since when did the rest of world took upon itself to "solve" their problem? Did we all get green card or something?
I don't feel like this will stop here. What's the next word some people in some other country decided to declare offensive?
Shame.