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GitHub to replace "master" with alternative term to avoid slavery references

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CliffyB's Cock Holster
Ludicrous.

Master is not problematic, its embedded in all sorts of terms connoting superiority and responsibility. Unless we are outlawing any description off someone being a master of their craft, technique, skill etc. What's the point?

Slave is not an inherently racist term either, essentially its a descriptor of a relative power-position. You could soften it to become master and servant, but thats only a distinction where the subordinate has its own agency, it makes no sense otherwise.

Yes, as a matter of historic fact ethnic and racial groups have been subjugated and enslaved, but as its happened to/and been perpetrated by peoples from all around the globe, reducing it to a blacks enslaved by whites only thing is missing the point.
 

Great Hair

Banned
wuGUUgr.jpg
 
I agree with this, not on PC terms, but because the relationship between branches is not analogous to master and slave.
In a master-slave or manager-worker relationship, the master/manager controls the slave/worker. This isn't the case in version control so main makes more sense.

Renaming male/female connectors would be dumb, because that analogy is perfect and everyone understands it.
 
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Let's see how the financial people will react when BLM hears about books being 'in the black/red'.

All this shit is just a form of compelling speech.
 
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Mihos

Gold Member
They need move the tail or won't get the cookies.

Having said that, I always thought that master-slave analogy in programming was dumb, as is male-female for cables... Why not just primary-secondary or out-in? I think it's easier to get what they do.

because secondary can be a backup, not a subservient downstream process. We usually use parent/child anyway.

and in out/means nothing on full duplex cables... which one would be 'in'? Outputs are mostly female... and so are inputs....
 
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VGEsoterica

Member
Black list and white list to me have the connotations of “good and evil” in a way that has zero to do with race and everything to do with an artistic and almost biblical sense.

but who am I to say? Never thought if it before this thread.
 

Herr Edgy

Member
Black list and white list to me have the connotations of “good and evil” in a way that has zero to do with race and everything to do with an artistic and almost biblical sense.

but who am I to say? Never thought if it before this thread.
You associate white and black with good and evil respectively. I get it. But you don't think that this is just more food for them?
 

Lord Thunderbear

Neo Member
Most databases are changing this too.

Primary / Secondary (Mongo)
Leader / Follower (RabbitMQ, EventStore)
So we're changing standardized terms with a bunch of different, non-standardized ones, without any technical reason involved and having to change everything that used the old terminology, be it tutorial, code, packagings, whatever. Just because of feelings.
In any other situation, anyone doing such a thing would be rightly deemed a fool. In the current climate, it is praised instead...
 

brap

Banned
Trying to get rid of master/slave would be a 50 year project and cost millions of dollars. There's too many concrete implementations and associated resources that use the terms for VCS, databases, storage, communication protocols, and a bunch of other stuff. Github needs some way to feel woke though, since "women in stem" and "abolish boys clubs" initiatives aren't getting the same updoots they used to.
Seems like a small price to pay so PoC's don't get scared away from coding by being reminded of the millions of years of oppression they faced...
 

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
One of the features in the product I own has the word “blacklist” all over the UI and codebase. To push this change, I estimate it will cost us the time of 1 full stack engineer for 3 days, plus the time of 2 customer support engineers for 1 month to write new materials and handle costumer training. Also, we’ll have to bring in marketing to communicate the change.

We are not doing it soon IMHO, but I bet we will soon be shamed into having to do it. Fuck you Sanctimonious Valley!
 

Celcius

°Temp. member
As a professional software developer myself, I support this. I always did wonder why they called it this and used the master/slave names... even with PC hardware with a master hard drive and slave.
 
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Belmonte

Member
Skeletor was a good dude after all.

He-Man and his friends made the entire universe their slaves! They were the Masters of the Universe.


giphy.gif
 

daveonezero

Banned
Removing words or ideas like this only makes real slaves and masters harder to identify.

it doesn’t help anything. It’s just a censoring virtues signal.
 

PhoenixTank

Member
I've legit never seen a git branch, out in the wild, called slave.
Not in the manual. "Mirror" gets used a lot in that kind of way, though. This ends up being a really weird leap of logic that "master" is somehow used in the slave/master context rather than the reality of it being akin to an audio master or "reference".

Nobody is going to make this change the default in Git itself.
 

GHG

Member
If I was a black person I'd be super pissed about all these white folk doing stupid shit like this instead of things that would actually improve society.

This is just a bunch of first worlders with too much time on their hands posing for the virtue camera.

"Look at us! We're contributing!"

I'm absolutely pissed off about this.

Nobody, not one single black person who has ever used github thought about master branches in this way. Not once when I've run a master branch command have I ever thought "slavery". Seriously, wtf, I have far more important things to think and worry about, especially when I'm coding.

This is a bunch of lunatic white people making matters worse, trivial things like this only set us back even more.
 

Rockman

Member
Man...I mean holy shit. The majority of the people out there have really lost their minds. At first it was amusing. Now it feels like a never ending joke. Nothing is sacred anymore. What's the next cool thing to be offended by? At this point it seems anything fair game....

Serenity now!
 
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