master (n): an original from which copies can be made
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Context is pretty important when it comes to words with multiple definitions. I find it hard to interpret the "master branch" as anything but this definition. Now if you're talking about PATA hard drives, I can understand updating the standard terminology there.
yeah we might know what a 'slave drive' is but it sure sounds sketchy lol
Thats not the only definition though. It's clearly the intended one, but it's possible to make someone think of other definitions when a word pops up.
And it's not too hard to go "Oh, I get why alternate definitions might make people uncomfortable, even if I have no issue with it." And if you can see why someone might be uncomfortable in a situation, and it's zero effort to avoid that situation... why not?
Unless you're intentionally trying to not understand, or lack empathy and genuinely can't understand why words with alternate definitions heavily linked to slavery might make people uncomfortable, it feels pretty self explanatory.
I'll give Linus a pass, because linux kernel is probably the most widely accessed repo out there, and changing defaults and standards can have an actual impact on third party tooling.
I genuinely can’t understand why words with alternate definitions linked to slavery might make people uncomfortable. It unintentionally reminds you bad things in history, and? Should we stop using words like "Nazi" or "War" too? Can we all stop using "death" while we're at it? It reminds me the mortal nature of human
Because there are words that have less violent associations that can still capture the relationship sought to be described.
[Stop using Nazi, war]
Those aren't used for computing though. And, yeah, I think if we did we probably should. Like if terms related to genocide were used for stopping a lot of processes at once that would be pretty weird to me.
[death]
Kill is used to refer to stopping processes and that's probably where the line is in my opinion. It feels very different to me to say "kill a process" versus "genocide a group of processes"
We do use war. It's a common package in Java. Should we rename that because it might make people uncomfortable when we say "We are going to deploy the war tomorrow"? Why can't we just accept the fact that words have multiple meanings?
I want to update the web app but war never changes.
hmm... have you tried nuking everything? That might help
[init]
defaultBranch = chaos