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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

You say this, and yet much of the tech industry has taken to removing words like blacklist and whitelist already, even though they have no racial undertones whatsoever. Similarly, the master branch of many projects has been renamed to main, even though it had nothing to do with slavery, and master remains an extremely common term.

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I always think of "master branch" in the same way as "master copy", and never associated it with "slave branches" or whatever. Renaming all the branches seems like needless busywork and frankly, people who would be offended by any use of the term "master", including ones like this, will need to understand the context and motivation of the use of a term as part of growing up and participating in a society with lots of other people. If everyone's right to not be offended were taken to a logical extreme, you end up with this minefield where literally no one is free to speak their mind and has to defend against every possible offended take. You can't even use a word that has a specific meaning if it also has some other meaning. It's just blasting holes in language and thinking and conversations.

I've had luck pushing back against it. I'm not sure if it's because I'm in Japan which doesn't buy into woke culture or if the people around me had just had a gutsful too. It doesn't hurt to try.

It's good to hear there's some places that don't buy in to the rampant silliness. You'd think a bastion of free speech like the USA would be one of those, but apparently the political polarization has caused people to lose their minds.

Whenever the master branch and slave branch thing comes up people say that it's fine because it has nothing to do with slavery.

The thing I don't understand is, even if it had something to do with slavery, why is that harmlful?

Honestly I've been fine with main branch. It's shorter. My problem is it's not consistent because it takes forever for a bigcorp to do something. So now we have repos with a main branch (the current branch) and a master branch (hasn't been touched in the year and half since the switch).

I don't have a particular problem with main, I was in fact more used to it as it was the default in P4.

However, the arguments for this renaming are absurd, and i think that absolutely matters.

And note that I actually think renouncing the use of master/slave in favor of primary/secondary or something similar is actually warranted. But extending this to master branch, when many of the people doing the change had a Master of Science title probably, is annoying and arbitrary.

Trunk is a much better term IMHO

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