Git Master Branch Debate

Git's use of master has nothing to do with the master/slave idea. The word master been a word longer than it has been associated with slavery. Not every use of master is offensive/rooted in slavery/racism.

The 'master' branch uses the word the same way an audio recording does. There isn't a corresponding slave.The word does come up in database replicas, which are often called master/slave. I can see a clear case where that would be offensive.Renaming the master branch might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it's just easier to do that right now, and it's a small price to pay.

"master" in Git doesn't have a relationship to slavery and yet it's being changed in repositories around the world.

IMHO the only problem is what people wanna see in words.master/slave has been with us since forever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23969906) and describes a relationship between two entities where one is the controller and the other is controlled, in many religions (including the most popular one) there is still a master God (or more than one) and believers are slave to God (wi

Master as in “master’s degree” is from a Latin word meaning teacher, and it’s the same root for mastery. I think most of the concern about tech usage comes from introducing the term “slave”, either directly in a pair or, as with Git, deriving from that usage. It’s that specific pairing along with the technical inaccuracy which makes master/slave considerably more likely to offend, in my opinion. If someone came to me and said, however, that they didn’t like the term and wanted to change it

In the context of Git, "master" is not used in the sense of a master/slave relationship but as a master copy. Are you hoping for a blanket ban of the word "master" regardless of the context?

Master has multiple meanings, not just slave master. As in mastery, master tape, master craftsman. In git, there are no "slave" branches, so "master" does not evoke slavery.

Are we so sensitive to racism that the word "master" is offensive? There is a task to change the default branch to "main".Note: there is no "slave" branch.Intent matters, not the literal meaning of the word taken a specific orthogonal context. Not a single person in the millions of developers ever had a perverse notion of what master branch means.

It makes some sense to remove the term slave since it's a direct reference to slavery and there are a bunch of other terms that you can use which won't be offensive and will also be more descriptive and professional. Master on the other hand has multiple different uses and meanings most of which have nothing to do with slavery. Changing the naming of git branches seems like a massive overreaction, doesn't achieve anything substantial and it also sets a strange precedent in which o

I have never seen a “slave” branch in my life. “master” does not only refer to master/slave relations. I’m fine with changing this but it is ever so slightly silly.