[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.