Anyone who believes that "master" is some kind of slur and takes the opportunity to take offense over it is not someone you want causing problems in your organization.
Honestly, I feel like if you would have a problem with a particular community you would like to have it resolved too right? I just don't think that it's ever been about terminology because you never had to feel uncomfortable because of it. That's not bad however, but it's easy to forget that if you don't relate to someone subjective reality, doesn't mean it's any less real.
If someone still struggles to get behind it, think of the few chars that will be shorter to type and also think how it is much easier to compare the branch concept a real tree, and talk about the main branch. Maybe they could have gone for trunk? (If you care so much about main vs trunk, then choose whatever makes you happy)
main implies that one branch is more important than the others. This could be offending to some.
What if one branch is actually more important than others? What about weighted graphs? Stochastic dominance? You can't blindly project social concepts on math/computing science, it's a blind alley.
I can't tell if this is satire or not.
People have different life experiences and backgrounds. The cost to you of renaming is near zero, if you’re the one loudly opposing something that makes your coworkers more comfortable then you’re the one causing problems in the organisation.
> The cost to you of renaming is near zero
Not true. I just had to update a load of tests for a git client I'm working on that assume the default branch name is `master` (I wrote them before this mess), and now I have to configure Git on every system I use to use a default name of master. It's not a huge pain, sure, but it isn't nothing and I don't get any benefit from it either.
> It’s not a huge pain, sure, but it isn’t nothing and I don’t get any benefit from it either
The entire notion here is accommodating people. It doesn’t benefit you personally but it does benefit others. And it’s not a huge pain. At a certain point we’re expending more energy debating doing this than if everyone just did it and moved on with their lives.
It wasn't in the client, it was in the tests. You know like, here's a script that makes a test repo:
git init
git add foo.txt
git commit -m "A"
git switch -c develop
git add bar.txt
git commit -m "B"
git merge master # This will break soon.
Is it though? It seems to me like the notion is appearing to accommodate people. I still haven't seen a single person say "my great grandfather was a slave and this offends me", only people saying "this might offend someone".
In today's world, it's enough for many companies. Si vis pacem, para bellum. You don't want to passively wait until you're attacked, you need to prepare the defenses first so your enemies don't even have a ground to stand.
Pushing a narrative that these people are "gonna do something to us" is a weird one to push. What's gonna happen? We're gonna be kinder to one another? We would want to make people around us happy in a profoundly human way rather than a shallow one?
Just to follow you along in your way of thinking. What are "we" gonna do to your job and your companies? I honestly fail to see what you mean.
Cancel culture, which grand parent is referring to, is real. You will find many anecdotes on Hacker News. Here is one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484347
Also, I wouldn't do that. Emancipating an actual workforce or colleagues would be my solution, not making the company suffer under it.
Here we have an example of how you go about dealing with the issue
If you can trivially avoid even the risk of offending someone — especially in a professional context — then why wouldn’t you?