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
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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