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