I had always assumed it was master as in master recording, i.e that from which the branches deviate. But words change their freight and their connotations, as us old white men know full well.

Reluctantly using Outlook for Android
From: Tei-council <tei-council-bounces@lists.tei-c.org> on behalf of Raffaele Viglianti <raffaeleviglianti@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2020 4:10:45 PM
To: Hugh Cayless <philomousos@gmail.com>
Cc: TEI Council <tei-council@lists.tei-c.org>
Subject: Re: [Tei-council] Git branch naming
 
Thanks Hugh for bringing this to our attention.

I have already begun using 'main' or more descriptive branch names for new projects that I'm setting up. There may be a few things we need to change for TEI (many of which Elisa and Hugh have already identified), but I don't think it'll be too onerous. TEI's git should just 'work' for new users, council members, etc, because git is quite apt at dealing with the default branch regardless of what it's called (e.g. when cloning TEI, you get 'dev', the arbitrary named default branch).

My 2 cents is that there certainly are out there uses of the word 'master' that are warranted because skills and competences can and should be mastered, but for file versioning this is hardly the case and it is proven that the metafor is based on enslavers and enslaved people (whether this was done intentionally or not -- see the tweet Hugh linked).

Raff

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:00 AM Hugh Cayless <philomousos@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm going to gently disagree with you, Martin. I think it's precisely us old white people who need to work on picking apart the threads of structural racism and not put that work off on others. But I understand and sympathize with your reluctance to pronounce on this issue!

All the best,
Hugh



On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 10:31 AM Martin Holmes <mholmes@uvic.ca> wrote:
Hi all,

My gut feeling is that old white males like me should have no part in a
decision like this. We have (I hope) a large enough community of TEI
users who don't fall into my category, and they should tell us what's
appropriate.

Cheers,
Martin

On 2020-07-02 7:01 a.m., Hugh Cayless 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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> Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org
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>

--
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Humanities Computing and Media Centre
University of Victoria
mholmes@uvic.ca
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