The point of political correctness is that it's always things you'd never consider... but someone else does. I'm not here to say whether things are right or wrong or if "master" is good or bad. but you perfectly highlight the reasoning behind it.

To you, the only thing that comes up is the technology context. And that's perfectly reasonable. To someone else, the unrelated slave owning context may just be tightly coupled with that word, and that immediately comes to mind when they hear the word regardless of context. And someone in that scenario is probably not having a positive correlation with the word.

So a group of people have a very understandable reason to have a negative correlation with the word, and it's super easy to use a different word, so it seems to make sense to just use the other word.

All my git scripts these days have a $(git remote show origin | sed -n '/HEAD branch/s/.*: //p') in them, which just fetches whatever origin calls the head branch. so if I want to rebase from main/master/prod/lead/front/etc ... the command will figure out which one to use for me.

[–] nialv7@lemmy.world 13 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

What weirded me out is that (IIRC) most who advocated the use of main weren't who would have a negative correlation with the word master.

Not that I have a problem with avoiding the use of master (I don't use master for my branches), but this felt virtue signal-y to me at the time.

[–] bisby@lemmy.world 8 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah. theres a fine line between advocating for positive change because it's the right thing to do vs because it makes you look good. Theres a fine line between being an ally and empty virtue signalling, and those things may not look different within the scope of a single interaction. It can sometimes take a bit to understand if someone is genuine or just performing.

[–] LwL@lemmy.world 4 points 2 hours ago

There's also the possibility of having genuinely good intent, but still speaking entirely from your own conjecture of what might make others uncomfortable.

Ultimately, you should always talk to the people actually affected and take action based on that. But anyone can and should start the initiative when they think something is harmful.

[–] Schal330@lemmy.world 14 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

For me I pictured "master" as perfecting something. So when I asked someone as a noob why things were being switched from master to main I was surprised at the possibility that it could be related to master/slave, but completely understood why from that point.

[–] Wiz@midwest.social 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I wonder if you could think of another word besides slave terminology that might mean that.

Like maybe the "perfect" version?

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 16 hours ago

"It's not the master branch, it's the perfect branch. The superior branch!"