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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

I would like to point out that it's perfectly OK to have master/slave relations between computers, hard disks and git branches. The only place where it's problematic is between humans. Perhaps we would do well to remember that words can have different meanings in different contexts. It's nice to try to be considerate of people who are sensitive to certain issues, but at the same time they would do well to limit their sensitivity to where it's appropriate.

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Absolutely.. most people complaining about this seem to want to purge the concept itself.. which is crazy to me. The concept is just that. It is not good or bad if you don't involve any human parties and practise it. It just describes that one or many entities control one or many other entities.

Culture has become oversensitive in a bad way. And IMO changing "master" to "main" won't help fight racism at all. It is just some useless showpiece action to render whoever it does as a good person or company.

> Perhaps we would do well to remember that words can have different meanings in different contexts.

I’m afraid this idea is rapidly becoming deprecated - now if a word has multiple meanings, we pick whichever one is most offensive and forget the others

(No judgement on whether that’s a good thing or not, I see pros and cons)

Exactly. The computer systems have no way way to subjugate each other, with perhaps the exception of the rather extreme STONITH. I think dominant and submissive better captures the relationship between nodes: the nodes agree upon their roles and exchange power in a consenting relationship. If nodes are not agreeing to power exchange, you end up with all kinds of split brain behavior and data corruption.

Its perfectly fine between humans as well. The difference between humans an machines is, one can and should give consent the other not.

Master / slave are catch all terms versus more precise ones that represent the exact relationship of two systems.

I personally prefer primary/secondary anyway.

So do I, but I wouldn't care enough to start a debate about it.

If you did care enough to debate about it, that's okay.

That doesn't infer the same relationship of dependency, but infers a parallel independent relationship.

Not the same thing.

Primary / Replica.

That's not either, slave is not always a "replica" of the master, only in some contexts.

And a master does not even need a slave (like in the github case) - so git's master is not even like the master (who had slaves) that people are offended about.

It's more similar to the meaning of audio master, like a reference copy, not that branches are slave of it.

So in a master slave database setup, the slave does all the work while the master supervises?

That's... A really good argument.

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