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by johnisgood 209 days ago
The whole terminology in IT could be turned upside down because it can be quite offensive if people ignore the context, so it is not limited to processes. There are utilities like "man", "finger", etc. that could come across as offensive too, to some, with no context-awareness.

Today it is "master" -> "main", tomorrow the whole IT terminology.

There are many PRs on GitHub with regarding to these, by the way.

... also what about pins? Slave and master pins! Must be about slavery, right? No, it is not, not at all.

In any case, who made the association of the git branch "master" to slavery? It is absurd. People need to take the context into account.
2 comments
optionalsquid 209 days ago
> In any case, who made the association of the git branch "master" to slavery? It is absurd.

BitKeeper, the VCS that preceded Git, used the terminology "master" and "slaves", so the association is not based on nothing:

https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/0524ffb3f6f1...

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johnisgood 209 days ago
It is based on nothing. It is not intended to be offensive, and it is not intended to be about slavery. Similarly how master and slave pins are not either, or how blacklist and whitelist are not about race either!
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johnisgood 209 days ago
BTW FreeBSD changed blacklistd to blocklistd. :(

I do not mind blocklistd, but then again, there was nothing wrong with blacklistd either.

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ret2plt 209 days ago
I grant it's not nothing, but I think it's not enough of something to make changes over it. Thinking of a master record or similar is the natural reaction when you learn about the terminology, and most young people have never used bitkeeper, so unless you go out of your way to explain why this is "bad" most people won't even know, so what do you gain from it?
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dzhiurgis 209 days ago
IMO for something to be offensive it has to have intention to be offensive. Otherwise it's misunderstanding.
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johnisgood 209 days ago
Of course, but they do not care about that. They made the association, and now they are being vocal about it. I am pretty sure most of us never made this association or attribution. I have never thought about slavery until they told me their own associations to it.

I am pretty sure master / slave pins were not intended to be offensive, nor attributed to slavery. Similarly with the git "master" branch.

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johnisgood 209 days ago
And quite frankly, the problem is that we cater to such people instead of teaching them to be context-aware.
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