Regardless of why it's called master, the term bothers some people quite a bit and the cost to use a different term is trivial.
There is a small cost to updating existing projects, but for new projects, the cost to use a different term is zero. In return you make your workplace less hostile to some of your co-workers (or potential co-workers). This should be an easy decision.
It seems to me that, unless it comes from the mouth of a black person, opinions as to the offensiveness of “master” are worse than worthless.
I would even say more, a non-american-black person. It's like forgetting that even though most of american-black people have been subject to white master/black slave slavery, most black people on earth are African black, where they have not been subject to white master/black slave slavery (they have been subject to white colonialism, but they've also been subject to black/black slavery)
> So it’s like, you know what you’re saying is not right. You’re just not trying.
https://madamenoire.com/1167067/working-while-black-my-cowor...
What you're saying is that all uses of the word master implies master/slave, which is what people are disagreeing with. In the recording industry, everyone uses the term master to denote the production copy of combined tracks. The tracks that make up a master are not slaves. In the same way that branches that make up a master vcs are not slaves.
In git parlance, master is where your builds come from for deployment. And branches are where you work on features. When branches are complete they merge back into master. How does this relate in any way to a master/slave definition? Based on the logic used, I would expect record studios to be moving away from using the word master as well.
What it implies depends entirely on reader perspective. What I'm suggesting is that with at little or often zero cost we can avoid this whole issue and make some users more comfortable working with us.
I could understand the argument if there was some kind of big cost to changing. The company I work with uses the master repo and I'm not advocating internally to change it right now. But for future, I'll use main. Because there is zero reason not to.
> In git parlance, master is where your builds come from for deployment.
As has been pointed out multiple times on this topic, use of the term in git did not come from the record industry. Git almost certainly uses the term master because Linux kernel developers used Bitkeeper prior to git. And Bitkeeper absolutely used the terminology master/ slave.
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...
> I have wished many times I would have named them "main" (and "upstream") instead. > Glad it's happenning
On an aside, that’s a profoundly awful website. At one point, over 60% of my screen was filled with ads (top banner video ad, bottom banner image ad, inline text video ad).
Geez.
> There is a small cost to updating existing projects, but for new projects, the cost to use a different term is zero.
But if we want to talk about words used in workplaces that do imply control and ownership, can we discuss "subordinate"? Because that word is the most analogous word to "slave" that is used in everyday business.