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Comment by unwoundmouse | Hacker News Reader

You know, i highly doubt any developer black or not ever looked and said “wow this master branch naming really makes me feel oppressed.” If this is you, please correct me. However, i do know lots of developers have bash scripts, terminal aliases, python workers that use the “master” terminology that will need to be changed. This seems like an absurd and unnecessary change to me, causing more net damage than benefit. Beyond git, i believe master is a power dynamic that exists and is sometimes the best way to model a system - and we should attempt to describe systems clearly unrelated to racism as accurately as possible

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As a black developer... this all just makes me a little sad.

Terms like master/slave or whitelist/blacklist are common parlance and this attempt to remove these phrases for less well understood phrases just seems like an attempt to whitewash history for little to no gain.

I'm a firm believer that language is dynamic and the meaning of words is the meanings we currently associate to them.

Perhaps you mean "attempt to blackwash history"...

And it's all very us centric too.

In my native language, we have something called "black notebook" which is essentially a blacklist. It has nothing to do with skin color, never been. It's more reference to bright and dark - it's a list of people you wouldn't do business with. It's very natural for people to use words from of their sensors. We call greenfield)brownfield in a similar manner.

GitHub is a US company. HN is run by a US company.

So? Blacklist or master words dont have its roots in the us, and they don't have their roots in the racist history either.

Because you wrote "it's all very us centric too" - and I struggle to find out how that's a relevant comment given that "GitHub, Inc. is an American multinational", so obviously embedded in the US context, and American interpretation of the words.

But github caters to a global market. That's why replacing master->main is just doing busy work that doesn't do anything to address the problem?

That global market includes the US, which is a substantial part of GitHub's revenue.

This thread started as madsmith's valid comment that "that language is dynamic and the meaning of words is the meanings we currently associate to them" - how do we determine what meanings are associated with a given term? All indications are that it has a US origin, which provides the appropriate interpretation.

What is "the problem" and what should GitHub do to address the problem?

If the problem US-centric, and you think the US-only issues can be ignored because GitHub caters to a global market, then isn't your logic that GitHub should do nothing?

A lot of systems I use have renamed master/slave to leader/follower.

It set me back a moment the first time I saw it, and took me about 30 seconds to mentally internalise the change. After that first time, no issues as a reader of the code/config.

Leader/follower, primary/replica, sender/receiver, primary/fallback... not only do these phrases avoid the charged language of "master/slave", but they can also often describe the roles of the two components more precisely.

The historical usage of "master/slave" for the two drives on an IDE channel is a great example of the imprecise use of these terms -- it implies a relationship between the devices that doesn't exist at all. Both devices respond directly to commands from the host; the second device on the channel is not under the command of the first one.

As we transition to more dynamic clusters from older fixed infrastructure arrangements of the past, some of that terminology is dying on its own (not to imply we shouldn’t help it along).

Leader, for instance, implies a more fluid arrangement of the chain of command that better reflects what happens when a new machine takes over for a server that is having problems or being maintained.

Why do their scripts need to be change? It's not retroactively modifying repos.

    sed -i 's/master/main/g' *

Problem solved!

This past summer I helped teach a bunch of students to code, students who were from under-represented populations here in the U.S. They were horrified to learn where the 'master' term came from.

Switching from master to main is a good change.

The 'master-slave' terminology has been used in tech for a while (for example, IDE [0]). Yes, it's not intended to be a direct reference to slavery, but that's where the term originated and it's clearly used to mean "one thing is in charge, the other thing follows orders". Yes, there's no explicit 'slave' term in git, even though BitKeeper did (apparently - I've never used BitKeeper).

It's not effortless, but it's not hard to change from master to main ( [1] ).

Plus, it's a great excuse to learn (or sharpen) your grep/awk/sed/etc skills :)

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[0]: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/ide.htm#pt4

[1]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBra...

A couple of months ago I collected a few similar accounts, which were either given on HN or directly linked to from HN, over the past 10+ years of discussion of this topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23763739

Do you that the word "liberty" comes from the Latin "libertas" which means the "condition of being not a slave"?

Tell it to your students next time and let's all make a fuss about the use of the word.

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