On Tue, Jun 09, 2020 at 05:16:57PM +0200, Simon Pieters wrote: > Thank you for your encouraging response, Brian, and the research of > what the change entails for git. > > I've added Don to the cc, who started to work on implementing this change: > > https://twitter.com/DEGoodmanWilson/status/1269931743320182784 > https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/issues/2674 > > Although I think it's reasonable to move away from 'master' regardless > of its origin, today Tobie Langel pointed me to > https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html > where, one year ago, Bastien Nocera made the case that git's 'master' > is in fact a reference to master/slave. Well, he pointed out that Bitkeeper used this terminology. Git doesn't have any internal concept of "slave" -- the only time you see this word used in the codebase is in the test suite, and we should absolutely change that. I am torn on this issue -- I certainly want the project to be inclusive to all, but English has a lot of concepts that start with "master" and do not trace their origin to subjugation of fellow human beings: - masterpiece - masterful - master's degree - master copy Making this change in git seems like attacking the problem at the wrong end. Branch names are already fully arbitrary in Git -- you can have a repo without a master branch. Perhaps the best way to address it is to introduce a "default branch name" configuration variable, or just work without any default branches and let the next step after "git init" be "git branch". -K
