[tomp]

The problem with git master->main is, that if you don’t say “no”, there’s always gonna be the next thing. Like “ant colony”. Ironically Scott Aarson has himself written about this, after having realised he was, like you, wrong for not saying “no”. (Too late.)

You have to say “no”.

[gspr]

I don't buy that logic. I have absolutely no problem with the word "master" for e.g. a main branch, or for something that controls something else for that matter, but why wouldn't it be OK to let someone do all the work of changing a fine word into an equally fine one? How does that force you to do non-neutral, negative, changes in the future?

[tomp]

In your mind, it’s “fine work” but in their minds, it’s winning a political battle, and they’re just empowered for the next battle.

Bad politics (exclusionary, racist, destructive, forcefully equalising, speech controlling, bullying, anti-meritocratic - i.e. wokeism) need to be opposed.

If the change was proposed & made on technical merit, I wouldn’t oppose it. But it wasn’t - it was based on ideological bullying

[gspr]

> In your mind, it’s “fine work” but in their minds, it’s winning a political battle, and they’re just empowered for the next battle.

Why should I spend energy to try to gauge their motivations? And why should I care if I don't like the outcome of that estimation? I feel your criticism is refusing to admit a (low-priority, highly cosmetic) bugfix into an open source project because you don't like the political views of the committer.

To me, it's a pure calculation:

* To me, the words "master" and "main" equally well describe the most-important branch of my git repository.

* To some people, "master" is offensive. I don't understand this at all, but to these people, "main" is better.

* Someone else is offering to do the work.

So letting them is a net change for some people, and neutral for me. So why not?

> Bad politics (exclusionary, racist, destructive, forcefully equalising, speech controlling, bullying, anti-meritocratic - i.e. wokeism) need to be opposed.

Also by ignoring non-negative contributions from such people?

> If the change was proposed & made on technical merit, I wouldn’t oppose it. But it wasn’t - it was based on ideological bullying

That's the pointing: I'm arguing it has non-negative technical merits. So why care?

I'd be all on your side if "main" wasn't actually an equally good word! In fact, I think I'm driving people a little bit nuts by opposing things that have small negative impact all the time. I try not to compromise in that department. But I'm simply arguing that changing "master" to "main" here has no negative impact.

[stickfigure]

It's often not such a trivial change. Depending on the profile of your project, it may affect a lot of people and a lot of tooling downstream. That person volunteering to "do the work" isn't really doing all the work.

[gspr]

Sure. But user tomp's arguments don't seem to be relying on a hypothesis of non-trivial change.