Re: [Tei-council] Git branch naming

Thank you, Hugh, for opening this conversation up among Council. Should be no surprise that I'm fully in favor of getting rid of 'master' and 'slave' language whenever possible. I appreciate the points everyone else has raised upthread, and am heartened by Elisa's observation that this may be an opportune time to experiment with how such a change will impact the build process. Hugh and Nicholas are certainly right in pointing out that performative actions often hinder or distract from more substantive changes in practice and process; but (1) this is the sort of change that can have a big impact in Black and brown folks' encounters with TEI, insofar as it would dissolve an unnecessary barrier and guttural negative response to the grammar of encoding work; and (2) I think the spirit and intention behind this change does and can continue to carry forward into Council's everyday work. In general, my approach with these things is: if it's a small thing, why not change it (in addition to tackling bigger things), and if it's a big thing, better to start now than later. -j. On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:27 AM Martin Holmes wrote:

Hi Hugh,

I take your point, but I was thinking really that rather than doing the archetypal "here let me fix that for you" thing that we tend to default into, we should do more of the "shut up, step back and get out of the way" approach proposed by Deb Verhoeven at DH2015.

Cheers, Martin

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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 mailto: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

On 2020-07-02 8:00 a.m., Hugh Cayless wrote: the

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> 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

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> 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Tei-council mailing list > Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org mailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org > http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council >

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