Konstantin, My feelings generally are: if you have to explain why it isn’t racist, then there’s probably a better alternative. But in this case it appears the roots really are in problematic terminology. Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that as a first step, my current work is focused on making the default branch name configurable via `git config` or environment variables. I’m working on a good clean patch for that functionality this week. I'll share more once the patch is looking better. Don Goodman-Wilson On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 6:06 PM Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > 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
