Re: Consensus on a new default branch name

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email>
Date: Jul 2, 2020, 21:15 UTC
Message-ID: <4bbc8658-4dad-10ef-65a4-8f0f4f4fffd4@iee.email>
In-Reply-To: <16f1c63a-8b30-e95e-50d1-c5baa9a72fa4@whinis.com>

On 02/07/2020 13:21, Whinis wrote:

> Peff,
>
> With all respect I have yet to see any evidence actually presented
> against master either.

The earliest claim I can find is from 2003, verified at Snopes in 2007 [1] and reported in 2003 at [1] (and elsewhere)

I would not expect that the original complaint had been withdrawn. I don't know if the relevant US/local laws have changed.

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> The original list makes the claim its offensive and everyone I have
> asked on other forums just says its obvious its offensive but cannot
> say how it is without resorting to `Do you not find enslaving humans
> offensive`. About all we have is twitter where you can easily find
> people saying its time to go and that changing it makes them feel
> worse as they had no problem with it and yet its being forced through
> in their name. L makes a case with research that the initial claim was
> also not made in good faith at
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/20200621195023.3881634-1-lkcl@lkcl.net/ .
> The link is also more on the master/slave depart but many of the
> points researched cover this one as well.

A recent blog post on racial bias in AI [2] highlighted that "Algorithms are our opinions written in code", just as many of our naming conventions are implicit stand-ins for unsurfaced opinions and biases.

One area that is far more obvious in the UK, is the use of euphemisms and innuendo, which can be grossly misused. It is quite easy to create subtlety different phrases which actively discriminate that wouldn't be noticed except by the careful or 'in the know' listener. This can easily be done with 'master' in Git.

From a comment in [3], the link [4] provides details of the association of 'master' with 'slave' in Engineering literature, beginning in 1904 for a pendulum & clock arrangement. In electronic clock circuits it wasn't till 1966 the use extended to flip-flop circuits, while hydraulic master/slave cylinders started in 1959.

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>
> I like that you want to err on the side of empathy but based on how
> most of these changes have been forced through their communities I do
> not think the ones arguing for this would do the same for you. As can
> partially be seen with the claim that there is no amount of work that
> can justify continuing to use master or a host of other terms.

Branch names are meant to be ephemeral is the wider Git ecosystem, so Git should be able to allow the user to chose their own default name.

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>
> My personal feeling is it should not change as while many on this list
> certainly are speaking in good faith and want to help the momentum
> behind the change very much is not. While I know its not part of this
> list check out the gitlab issue where they finally opened it back up
> for discussion at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/221164
> and it adds onto those that seem to argue for attack any who argue
> against.

The other issue is that Git doesn't do unique masters anyway. If you have the correct commit hash you have a perfect, indistinguishable replica of the original object - It's not a master (in the old 'version control' sense) any more, so we don't need that name for local clone's branch, unless it happens to be copied as the remote tracking branch. Though that is orthogonal to this discussion.

> If a change is going to be made that will affect million of developers
> and possibly break thousands to millions of applications

As I understand the change process, this will not be the catastrophic change many are suggesting. Existing repositories will still continue working. New repositories will have options for choosing the defaults. The usual level of great care over backward compatibility is being taken.

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>   I would say that you need a mountain of proof and not what has been
> seen so far.
>
> If I may ask what is the intended result of the change if it cannot be
> measured?
>

Anyway, that's the back story, with references, that I've been able to track down. Hope that helps.

Philip

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/masterslave/ [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3243656.stm [3] https://dev.to/educative/understanding-racial-bias-in-machine-learning-algorithms-4cij [4] Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/40061475 "Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature "