[susam]

Political correctness aside, "main" does sound like a more natural name for the main branch.

The term "master" for a branch name always felt a little strange to me. One might ask, "What is master?" The answer usually is, "It is the main branch."

The same thing held true for "trunk" in the SVN world, although it made more sense. One might ask, "What is trunk?" It requires a lengthy explanation, "It is the main development branch. We will create other release branches from it. Imagine a tree with a trunk from which other branches grow."

One is less likely to ask, "What is the main branch?" The branch name is self-explanatory.

[andy_ppp]

Master also means principal. Controlling speech due to political correctness is extremely post modern but I’m not sure that language creates reality in the way these people seem to think. Words are not inherently racist it’s how people use them, therefore I’m against changes like these where clearly there’s no racism at all in having a master branch.

[thu2111]

I’m not sure that language creates reality in the way these people seem to think

This is the core dispute underlying a lot of critical theory vs the world culture wars. Certain types of people, typically those who have spent a long time in the education system, believe words and ideas are incredibly powerful, so powerful in fact that you can change the world by changing what words people use. This can be seen in a lot of the (IMO) bizarre or dysfunctional stuff coming out of Silicon Valley lately, like word vector models that were "debiased" to make them give politically correct but false answers about the world, this GitHub debacle, capitalising word black when talking about black people etc..

IMHO most people who haven't been exposed to the professoriate don't think like this. The function is seen as more important than the form. Stating something that's false is true doesn't make it true, it just makes the speaker seem stupid and/or dangerous.

[valand]

Agreed. Master being a bad connotation to some people are not the problem of the word itself.

Some time if `main` turns out non-inclusive, changing it to other term is counter-productive.

They must change to the source of bad connotation itself if they want to really contribute to those they claim they are helping. If the bad connotation `master` comes from slavery, then fight slavery or slavery-like acts to get rid the bad connotation from the term `master`.

I don't understand why this is not a common sense. Smh

[_y5hn]

Post modern probably doesn't mean what you didn't think it means. Words can be cool, but misused.

[andy_ppp]

It is you who doesn’t understand post modernism, here’s a definition about reality being constructed rather than based on science:

https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html

“ In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually.”

Hence why the explanation that master should be changed to main to avoid some people thinking git and GitHub are racist.

[_y5hn]

I stand corrected. Thanks!

[tzs]

> Political correctness aside, "main" does sound like a more natural name for the main branch

Sure, but who says that what is now called "master" is the main branch?

In my repos, I consider the main branch to be the branch I spend most of my time working on. For simple things that is "master", but for more complex things I'm mostly on some other branch.

[hinkley]

What’s a branch? What do branches connect to? What is a “main branch”? It’s not the trunk. It’s the largest branch.