Well, it’s going to be significant for the build process, of course—our Jenkins servers that rely on calling particular branches will need to be updated in a coordinated way. But this would seem to be a good time to experiment anyway, as Syd, Peter, and Martin are discussing our build processes. 

I think we should change the name, mostly for the semantic reasons Nicholas raises. But the appearance of the name matters too, as I found in a project meeting recently when I mentioned the move to rename GitHub’s “master” to “default“ branch. The group of US 19th-century text scholars I was talking to were instantly in favor, hearing in “master” the language of slavery. 

In our case, though, I wonder if we should call it the “stable” branch, by contrast with the “dev” branch, since for us on Council who work most often in this repo, “dev” is where we work most often. What do you think?

Best,
Elisa

Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD
Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital Humanities |  Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College

Typeset by hand on my iPhone

On Jul 2, 2020, at 10:13 AM, Nicholas Cole <nicholas.cole@history.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

 Dear Hugh,

Thank you for raising this.  On the one hand, like you, I am suspicious of such actions sometimes.  For example, the academic term Master (a translation of the Latin Magister) is sometimes confused to mean ‘master' in the sense of the Latin dominus.  Thus, many Oxford colleges are headed by a ‘Master’ (taken from the academic rank, not the idea of a controller of others), and I see absolutely no problem with this.

BUT — there’s no good use for the term in much of computer science. It often doesn’t describe things very well at all. By default, Mercurial (the direct Git competitor) calls its main branch ‘default’ rather than ‘master’.  I was going through the source code for the project I run recently, where we have some things that used to be called ‘Master Document List’ and such like.  I’ve renamed them all to things like ‘Complete Document List’, and it is actually more descriptive as well as removing potentially offensive language. I feel much better about it, and wish that I’d done it sooner. To aid transitions if any users were relying on old links, I’ve put in some sym links for now. 

So I would approve of a change for TEI.  ‘main’, in fact, isn’t all that descriptive.  I’d rather have a ‘release’ branch.  But perhaps that is just me.

Anyone using the Github interface won’t face too many broken links. I doubt that there are many other places where this would really be an issue, are there?

Best wishes,

Nicholas

On 2 Jul 2020, at 15:01, Hugh Cayless <philomousos@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All,

Some of you may have come across the recent move toward changing the default branch name in Git away from "master" to (probably) "main". My understanding is that GitHub is working on this, and that it will probably happen in Git as well. I'm aware of a number of projects that are moving ahead immediately on renaming their master branches. 

On the one hand, I'm generally in favor of this. The "master" terminology probably came from BitKeeper, which had "master" and "slave" repositories (rather than branches). I had always assumed it was meant in the sense of "master copy", like in sound recordings. But see also https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577 from the person responsible for the name (not a native English speaker). 

On the other hand, I'm slightly cynical about this sort of thing, as it's the kind of change one can make and feel righteous about without being *actually* significantly anti-racist. It's a bit performative, but sometimes it's important to set an example.

So I think we should consider going through the renaming process for TEI repos. There are probably some implications to doing that, broken links being the first one that comes to mind. What do you all think?

Hugh
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