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Does this mean we should never make progress or change anything?

Also if your tutorials are using a base repository to work from, then you can still have the branch "master" it's just not default. So your existing repos should still work. And if you changed your repo then you should be responsible for updating your documentation to reflect that. It's just good practice.

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I fail to see how changing the names from "master" and "slave" makes any "progress" at all. What is the most concise way to express the idea that one entity is totally subordinate to another, and must comply with every request the other sends?

I struggle to come up with any two terms that make this more clear than "master" and "slave". Just because we've abolished chattel slavery, doesn't mean we should avoid the very words themselves when they are appropriate. Destruction of meaning is far worse than some abstract offense that doesn't seem reasonable to take on behalf of a computer process.

What about giving master a new meaning? Actively banning it conservers its original meaning. Probably nobody today thinks about woman sitting in a room doing calculations when we speak about computers.

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