master/slave has been with us since forever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23969906) and describes a relationship between two entities where one is the controller and the other is controlled, in many religions (including the most popular one) there is still a master God (or more than one) and believers are slave to God (with the capital G)
But in Git there is simply a "master" branch, there is no master/slave relationship, there is no hierarchy enforced, branches are just copies that diverged from the master copy, master as in master recording or "the source from which all copies will be produced"
I honestly have a hard time understanding what's problematic with it.
> master/slave has been with us since forever
"Tradition" or "we've always done it that way" is not a great excuse, especially when part of the problem is systemic papercuts. It's not surprising that systemic issues rely a lot on "tradition" to do their dirty work.
Whether or not you agree with the particular etymology/association being questioned, the very point of questioning it is whether or not this "tradition" is worth the pain of systemic papercuts. We've got a lot of other useful words, we don't have to keep using ones that cause papercuts just because of "tradition" (whether or not you personally suffer from those papercuts).
I'm sorry for slavery in US, but slavery in US is hardly the only example of slavery in history.
master/slave describes more than just a hundred years of slavery in United States
It also describes thousands of years of religious beliefs, for example.
> the very point of questioning it is whether or not this "tradition" is worth the pain of systemic papercuts
Not to sound harsh, but 5 billion people are ok with it.
It's a linguistic problem for a small minority of the population that speaks English as a native language and super charge words meaning.
Take for example the word servomotor.
A servomotor is
> French servo-moteur, from Latin servus slave, servant + French -o- + moteur motor, from Latin motor one that moves
In Italian it is "servo motore", servo is the exact translation of slave.
Why is servomotor ok, why is "I'm a slave to Jesus" or "God is my master" ok, but master branch is not?
I'm simply curious of why some people can't let things go...
Essentially there are some people who will follow rules and trends without questioning them. Among those there are some who will actively seek to punish those who do not follow the rules.
This master/slave thing is a new rule born out of guilt and virtue signalling. This comes from the fact that some people see themselves as genuinely superior to others and this makes them uncomfortable. They virtue signal in an attempt to fight against this feeling, rather than just accepting what may be true, moving on, and continuing to be a good person. It's a phenomenon that has been observed in many contexts. The most vocal homophobes are often homosexual themselves. The most vocal religious devotees often have the strongest doubts.
This argument comes off as very condescending in a soft bigotry of low expectations-type of way, given there's nothing else within git that even hints to master being related to master-slave terminology.
Every word has more than one association. The argument is not that every association for the word is negative, but that one association is extremely negative, and we have the ability to use words that have fewer negative associations, so why shouldn't we use words with fewer negative associations?
That extremely negative association certainly isn't unique to the American past either, and if you think you are immune you are likely ignoring your own past. It's maybe being promoted by Americans because Americans see it as a more recent part of their past, still are wary of scars left behind from it. (Though even that isn't uniquely American; South African Apartheid is another easy example of recent history.)
Do whatever you like. I'm not telling you what to do. I'm not telling anyone what to do. I was merely explaining the controversy. I give up. I do not understand what all this hate is about. I'm just the messenger, but I guess I can take all the shots.
[1] Bitkeeper was the SCS that the Linux kernel had been using up to that point, and whose dropping of free licenses to open source projects like the Linux kernel was the immediate cause of the creation of both git and Mercurial.