Is renaming Git master branches for inclusive language reasons going overboard? | Hacker News Reader

Is renaming Git master branches for inclusive language reasons going overboard?

6 pointstawaybayarea8 comments

As with many these pseudoproblems, it is initiative by white people to signal virtue to other white people and show "moral superiority". I can't imagine someone actually feeling uncomfortable over it, this isn't even case of master/slave, "master" means just "primary" in this context. But I get it is easier to solve than real problems the marginalized groups face (such as police reform) and earn brownie points on Twitter (like with rainbow logos coming and going away every year).

What I am afraid of the most is that eventually GitHub etc. will force everyone to change names, including existing repositories, breaking CI pipelines and other things in the process. Sounds absurd, but unfortunately very possible in today's climate.

Do you have any evidence for your claim?

Because the first time I heard about it was from 17 years ago when a black man complained about the use of master/slave and filed an EEOC complaint. See https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/masterslave/ .

Your hypothesis is that virtue signaling describes the movement to get rid of the term.

Have you considered that the term master/slave was popularized and maintained as a form of virtue signaling?

Quoting from "Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature" by Ron Eglash" available from https://sci-hub.st/10.1353/tech.2007.0066 :

> ... being unconscious of social mores was a good sign for a future physicist, because physics transcends culture. Perhaps this kind of emphasis on a technical identity is at work here, too, and the master-slave metaphor is attractive to engineers because its free use “proves” that they inhabit a nonsocial or culture-free realm, which is a matter of professional pride

You read my post wrong. I said explicitly this is NOT a master/slave situation, "master" has completely different meaning here, there is not any "slave" branch under its rule.

I agree the master/slave pair itself is a weird terminology to use (especially the slave part), but master branch, master degree, master ball in Pokemon games are all fine in my book.

Context matters. This is not far away from attacking anything associated with words white/black.

Depends what going overboard means. Is it a waste of time? Well, it doesn’t take that much time, so no. Is it effective at fighting racism? My bets are on the number of people before and after the change who are racist being exactly the same. Whether it’s effective or not is dubious because we have no way of doing a measurement. Aren’t there some evidence-backed ways of fighting racism we can look at instead?

Agreed, this is token nonsense. No-one ever became racist because a MySQL server was referred to as a slave and no racist will stop being one if they are now called "Secondary" or something.

It makes some sense to remove the term slave since it's a direct reference to slavery and there are a bunch of other terms that you can use which won't be offensive and will also be more descriptive and professional. Master on the other hand has multiple different uses and meanings most of which have nothing to do with slavery. Changing the naming of git branches seems like a massive overreaction, doesn't achieve anything substantial and it also sets a strange precedent in which one use case of a word damages all others.

Will "Digital Remastering" become "Digital Remaining"?

A little more thought should be made before we hastily insist on major changes to everyday language.

It is just a start, even the word 'git' is offensive to some people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com