Git branch naming

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Re: [Tei-council] WG: A new tool...

Hugh Cayless

2 Jul 2020 2 Jul '20

4:01 p.m.

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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Nicholas Cole

2 Jul 2 Jul

4:13 p.m.

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

Hugh Cayless

4:38 p.m.

Prior to my messing around with it, the TCWs hosted at teic.github.io were pulling directly from the Documentation master branch (so they would have broken). They aren't anymore though. Possible there are some URLs in issues, I suppose, but there's not going to be a lot of that. I don't think there would be a *huge* impact. We would need to update our own local repos, but at least for the GLs and Stylesheets that shouldn't cause too much of a headache, because we don't work in the master branch. We would need to update our release docs a bit. On Thu, 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 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 _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

Elisa Beshero-Bondar

4:41 p.m.

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

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

Martin Holmes

4:31 p.m.

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

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

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

Hugh Cayless

5 p.m.

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 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

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

-- ------------------------------------- Humanities Computing and Media Centre University of Victoria mholmes@uvic.ca _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

Peter Stadler

5:08 p.m.

I wholeheartedly agree with Hugh — knowing that changing the name is only a very, very little move out of my privileged comfort zone. For what it’s worth, I like standardized naming schemes and if the general move is towards „main“ I’d like to follow that. Best Peter

...

Am 02.07.2020 um 17:00 schrieb Hugh Cayless :

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 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

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

-- ------------------------------------- Humanities Computing and Media Centre University of Victoria mholmes@uvic.ca _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

Raffaele Viglianti

5:10 p.m.

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 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 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

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

-- ------------------------------------- Humanities Computing and Media Centre University of Victoria mholmes@uvic.ca _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

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

Lou Burnard

5:14 p.m.

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 Androidhttps://aka.ms/ghei36 ________________________________ From: Tei-council on behalf of Raffaele Viglianti Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2020 4:10:45 PM To: Hugh Cayless Cc: TEI Council 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 mailto: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 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 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

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

Martin Holmes

5:27 p.m.

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 On 2020-07-02 8:00 a.m., Hugh Cayless 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 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 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 > > _______________________________________________ > 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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Jessica Lu

5:46 p.m.

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

...
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

...
> 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 > > _______________________________________________ > 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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-- *Dr. Jessica H. Lu* Associate Director, Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC http://dcc.umd.edu) University of Maryland Honors College *pronouns: she/her/hers* 0121 Prince Frederick Hall (301) 405-2866 jhl.jessica@gmail.com | http://jessica-lu.com *As I strive to strike a reasonable work/life balance, you may receive emails from me outside of traditional working hours. **Please do not feel any pressure to respond outside of *your own *working pattern. *

Nicholas Cole

5:56 p.m.

Dear Jessica, Just to clarify, because I don’t want the nuance to be lost at all — I actually *don’t* think this would be a merely performative change in this case, and I didn’t mean to be read that way. Computer UI design is all about metaphor, and the metaphor of the branch names is currently not helpful. This is an excellent opportunity to rename the ‘release’ branch as something more meaningful (for this reason, I’d rather have something other than ‘main’, in fact), *and* get rid of potentially and needlessly offensive language at the same time. It is an important signal to send and would bring clarity to the project. If you read what I wrote in any other way, I apologize for clumsy wording. Best wishes, Nicholas On 2 Jul 2020, at 16:46, Jessica Lu mailto:jhl.jessica@gmail.com> wrote: 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 mailto:mholmes@uvic.ca> 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 On 2020-07-02 8:00 a.m., Hugh Cayless 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 mailto:mholmes@uvic.ca 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 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Tei-council mailing list > Tei-council@lists.tei-c.orgmailto: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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Hugh Cayless

5:56 p.m.

Would it make sense to try to do this (for TEI and Stylesheets) around the upcoming release then? We could create a "main" branch basically now (or immediately after we complete the fight about what to call it 😁) from master and then do the work to make sure everything ends up in main at release time, then remove master. Hugh On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:47 AM Jessica Lu wrote:

...

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

...
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

...
> 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 > > _______________________________________________ > 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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-- *Dr. Jessica H. Lu* Associate Director, Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC http://dcc.umd.edu ) University of Maryland Honors College *pronouns: she/her/hers* 0121 Prince Frederick Hall (301) 405-2866 jhl.jessica@gmail.com | http://jessica-lu.com

*As I strive to strike a reasonable work/life balance, you may receive emails from me outside of traditional working hours. **Please do not feel any pressure to respond outside of *your own *working pattern. *

Elisa Beshero-Bondar

7:08 p.m.

That seems prudent to get to work on changing to a standard and inoffensive branch name now. Would our use of “main” vs. “dev” be consistent with other projects like ours that work on regular updates and release cycles? If so, I see no issue really with using “main” if that’s the one people get used to referring to as the latest stable version. 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 11:56 AM, Hugh Cayless wrote:

Would it make sense to try to do this (for TEI and Stylesheets) around the upcoming release then? We could create a "main" branch basically now (or immediately after we complete the fight about what to call it 😁) from master and then do the work to make sure everything ends up in main at release time, then remove master.

Hugh

...
On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:47 AM Jessica Lu wrote: 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

On 2020-07-02 8:00 a.m., Hugh Cayless 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 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 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 > > _______________________________________________ > 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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-- Dr. Jessica H. Lu Associate Director, Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC) University of Maryland Honors College pronouns: she/her/hers 0121 Prince Frederick Hall (301) 405-2866 jhl.jessica@gmail.com | http://jessica-lu.com

As I strive to strike a reasonable work/life balance, you may receive emails from me outside of traditional working hours. Please do not feel any pressure to respond outside of your own working pattern.

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

Nicholas Cole

7:26 p.m.

I don’t think there is likely to be a ’standard’ as such — different projects already use all kinds of different approaches. Some of them, for example, create new release branches (called ’stable/version-1/….all kinds of things) separate from their ‘main/master’ branches even now — so practice varies, and the appearance of standard nouns but divergent practice in fact creates a mirage. I’d be very much in favour of something more descriptive than ‘main’ — for these reasons: 1. A ‘release’ branch would be very clear. 2. Different projects already use main/master/default branches in different ways, so a ’standard’ name is likely to be misleading. 3. There’s no tool-chain advantage to “standard" naming that I am aware of. 4. Many of our users are not software developers, and so the use of ’standard’ (though I don’t think that in practice they really are) branch names offers no advantage if those branch names are themselves confusing. N. On 2 Jul 2020, at 18:08, Elisa Beshero-Bondar mailto:ebbondar@gmail.com> wrote: That seems prudent to get to work on changing to a standard and inoffensive branch name now. Would our use of “main” vs. “dev” be consistent with other projects like ours that work on regular updates and release cycles? If so, I see no issue really with using “main” if that’s the one people get used to referring to as the latest stable version. 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 11:56 AM, Hugh Cayless mailto:philomousos@gmail.com> wrote: Would it make sense to try to do this (for TEI and Stylesheets) around the upcoming release then? We could create a "main" branch basically now (or immediately after we complete the fight about what to call it 😁) from master and then do the work to make sure everything ends up in main at release time, then remove master. Hugh On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:47 AM Jessica Lu mailto:jhl.jessica@gmail.com> wrote: 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 mailto:mholmes@uvic.ca> 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 On 2020-07-02 8:00 a.m., Hugh Cayless 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 mailto:mholmes@uvic.ca 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 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Tei-council mailing list > Tei-council@lists.tei-c.orgmailto: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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-- ------------------------------------- Humanities Computing and Media Centre University of Victoria mholmes@uvic.camailto:mholmes@uvic.ca _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.orgmailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council -- Dr. Jessica H. Lu Associate Director, Design Cultures & Creativity (DCChttp://dcc.umd.edu/) University of Maryland Honors College pronouns: she/her/hers 0121 Prince Frederick Hall (301) 405-2866 jhl.jessica@gmail.commailto:jhl.jessica@gmail.com | http://jessica-lu.com http://jessica-lu.com/ As I strive to strike a reasonable work/life balance, you may receive emails from me outside of traditional working hours. Please do not feel any pressure to respond outside of your own working pattern. _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.orgmailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.orgmailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

Hugh Cayless

7:29 p.m.

My understanding is that "main" is the candidate default name (anyone who knows different should yell), and therefore GitHub might put in some affordances around that (maybe e.g. redirects from master to main? I dunno). So there *might* be advantages to choosing main. I quite like your idea of "stable" though. I guess "trunk" is another option too... On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 1:08 PM Elisa Beshero-Bondar wrote:

...

That seems prudent to get to work on changing to a standard and inoffensive branch name now. Would our use of “main” vs. “dev” be consistent with other projects like ours that work on regular updates and release cycles? If so, I see no issue really with using “main” if that’s the one people get used to referring to as the latest stable version.

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 11:56 AM, Hugh Cayless wrote:

Would it make sense to try to do this (for TEI and Stylesheets) around the upcoming release then? We could create a "main" branch basically now (or immediately after we complete the fight about what to call it 😁) from master and then do the work to make sure everything ends up in main at release time, then remove master.

Hugh

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:47 AM Jessica Lu wrote:

...
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

...
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 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

On 2020-07-02 8:00 a.m., Hugh Cayless wrote: 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Tei-council mailing list > Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org
> http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council >

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-- *Dr. Jessica H. Lu* Associate Director, Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC http://dcc.umd.edu) University of Maryland Honors College *pronouns: she/her/hers* 0121 Prince Frederick Hall (301) 405-2866 jhl.jessica@gmail.com | http://jessica-lu.com

*As I strive to strike a reasonable work/life balance, you may receive emails from me outside of traditional working hours. **Please do not feel any pressure to respond outside of *your own *working pattern. *

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

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Magdalena Turska

3 Jul 3 Jul

9:58 a.m.

...

From what GitHub has to say on the subject:

"The default branch is considered the “base” branch in your repository, against which all pull requests and code commits are automatically made, unless you specify a different branch." Basically it's marking a branch as 'default' that makes it a default starting point, not its name. Explicit links for master would be most probably broken, so that's the price of change. Doesn't seem too high for me. Fwiw, I do think that we should have a 1. formerly master branch renamed into main/stable/base/trunk whatever which effectively represents last release 2. dev branch for ongoing work aimed towards the next release which should always be 'stable', meaning nothing should be merged in that breaks the tests 3. feature/bugfix branches for work in progress, only when builds are successful for the feature branch a pull/merge request to dev should be approved M On Thu, 2 Jul 2020 at 19:29, Hugh Cayless wrote:

...

My understanding is that "main" is the candidate default name (anyone who knows different should yell), and therefore GitHub might put in some affordances around that (maybe e.g. redirects from master to main? I dunno). So there *might* be advantages to choosing main. I quite like your idea of "stable" though. I guess "trunk" is another option too...

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 1:08 PM Elisa Beshero-Bondar wrote:

...
That seems prudent to get to work on changing to a standard and inoffensive branch name now. Would our use of “main” vs. “dev” be consistent with other projects like ours that work on regular updates and release cycles? If so, I see no issue really with using “main” if that’s the one people get used to referring to as the latest stable version.

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 11:56 AM, Hugh Cayless wrote:

Would it make sense to try to do this (for TEI and Stylesheets) around the upcoming release then? We could create a "main" branch basically now (or immediately after we complete the fight about what to call it 😁) from master and then do the work to make sure everything ends up in main at release time, then remove master.

Hugh

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:47 AM Jessica Lu wrote:

...
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

...
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

On 2020-07-02 8:00 a.m., Hugh Cayless wrote: 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Tei-council mailing list > Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org
Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org>

...
> http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council >

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-- ------------------------------------- Humanities Computing and Media Centre University of Victoria mholmes@uvic.ca _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

-- *Dr. Jessica H. Lu* Associate Director, Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC http://dcc.umd.edu) University of Maryland Honors College *pronouns: she/her/hers* 0121 Prince Frederick Hall (301) 405-2866 jhl.jessica@gmail.com | http://jessica-lu.com

*As I strive to strike a reasonable work/life balance, you may receive emails from me outside of traditional working hours. **Please do not feel any pressure to respond outside of *your own *working pattern. *

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Nicholas Cole

10:29 a.m.

Indeed. And so we could pick any default name that makes sense. Which does raise a good question — which branch would we like the community to issue pull requests against. Presumably, in fact, ‘dev’. N On 3 Jul 2020, at 08:58, Magdalena Turska mailto:tuurma@gmail.com> wrote: From what GitHub has to say on the subject: "The default branch is considered the “base” branch in your repository, against which all pull requests and code commits are automatically made, unless you specify a different branch." Basically it's marking a branch as 'default' that makes it a default starting point, not its name. Explicit links for master would be most probably broken, so that's the price of change. Doesn't seem too high for me. Fwiw, I do think that we should have a 1. formerly master branch renamed into main/stable/base/trunk whatever which effectively represents last release 2. dev branch for ongoing work aimed towards the next release which should always be 'stable', meaning nothing should be merged in that breaks the tests 3. feature/bugfix branches for work in progress, only when builds are successful for the feature branch a pull/merge request to dev should be approved M On Thu, 2 Jul 2020 at 19:29, Hugh Cayless mailto:philomousos@gmail.com> wrote: My understanding is that "main" is the candidate default name (anyone who knows different should yell), and therefore GitHub might put in some affordances around that (maybe e.g. redirects from master to main? I dunno). So there *might* be advantages to choosing main. I quite like your idea of "stable" though. I guess "trunk" is another option too... On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 1:08 PM Elisa Beshero-Bondar mailto:ebbondar@gmail.com> wrote: That seems prudent to get to work on changing to a standard and inoffensive branch name now. Would our use of “main” vs. “dev” be consistent with other projects like ours that work on regular updates and release cycles? If so, I see no issue really with using “main” if that’s the one people get used to referring to as the latest stable version. 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 11:56 AM, Hugh Cayless mailto:philomousos@gmail.com> wrote: Would it make sense to try to do this (for TEI and Stylesheets) around the upcoming release then? We could create a "main" branch basically now (or immediately after we complete the fight about what to call it 😁) from master and then do the work to make sure everything ends up in main at release time, then remove master. Hugh On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:47 AM Jessica Lu mailto:jhl.jessica@gmail.com> wrote: 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 mailto:mholmes@uvic.ca> 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 On 2020-07-02 8:00 a.m., Hugh Cayless 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 mailto:mholmes@uvic.ca 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 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Tei-council mailing list > Tei-council@lists.tei-c.orgmailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org mailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org> > http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council >

-- ------------------------------------- Humanities Computing and Media Centre University of Victoria mholmes@uvic.camailto:mholmes@uvic.ca mailto:mholmes@uvic.ca> _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.orgmailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org mailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org> http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

Peter Stadler

10:31 a.m.

That is already the case. For both Stylesheets and TEI the dev branch is the default branch. Peter

...

Am 03.07.2020 um 10:29 schrieb Nicholas Cole :

Indeed. And so we could pick any default name that makes sense. Which does raise a good question — which branch would we like the community to issue pull requests against. Presumably, in fact, ‘dev’.

N

...
On 3 Jul 2020, at 08:58, Magdalena Turska wrote:

From what GitHub has to say on the subject:

"The default branch is considered the “base” branch in your repository, against which all pull requests and code commits are automatically made, unless you specify a different branch."

Basically it's marking a branch as 'default' that makes it a default starting point, not its name. Explicit links for master would be most probably broken, so that's the price of change. Doesn't seem too high for me.

Fwiw, I do think that we should have a

1. formerly master branch renamed into main/stable/base/trunk whatever which effectively represents last release 2. dev branch for ongoing work aimed towards the next release which should always be 'stable', meaning nothing should be merged in that breaks the tests 3. feature/bugfix branches for work in progress, only when builds are successful for the feature branch a pull/merge request to dev should be approved

M

On Thu, 2 Jul 2020 at 19:29, Hugh Cayless wrote: My understanding is that "main" is the candidate default name (anyone who knows different should yell), and therefore GitHub might put in some affordances around that (maybe e.g. redirects from master to main? I dunno). So there *might* be advantages to choosing main. I quite like your idea of "stable" though. I guess "trunk" is another option too...

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 1:08 PM Elisa Beshero-Bondar wrote: That seems prudent to get to work on changing to a standard and inoffensive branch name now. Would our use of “main” vs. “dev” be consistent with other projects like ours that work on regular updates and release cycles? If so, I see no issue really with using “main” if that’s the one people get used to referring to as the latest stable version.

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 11:56 AM, Hugh Cayless wrote:

Would it make sense to try to do this (for TEI and Stylesheets) around the upcoming release then? We could create a "main" branch basically now (or immediately after we complete the fight about what to call it 😁) from master and then do the work to make sure everything ends up in main at release time, then remove master.

Hugh

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:47 AM Jessica Lu wrote: 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

On 2020-07-02 8:00 a.m., Hugh Cayless 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 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 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 > > _______________________________________________ > 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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-- Dr. Jessica H. Lu Associate Director, Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC) University of Maryland Honors College pronouns: she/her/hers 0121 Prince Frederick Hall (301) 405-2866 jhl.jessica@gmail.com | http://jessica-lu.com

As I strive to strike a reasonable work/life balance, you may receive emails from me outside of traditional working hours. Please do not feel any pressure to respond outside of your own working pattern. _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

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

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Nicholas Cole

10:33 a.m.

Sorry. I hadn’t had enough coffee. So in fact, the only question is what we should call the branch we use for releases, and it won’t affect the tool chain at all.

...

On 3 Jul 2020, at 09:31, Peter Stadler wrote:

That is already the case. For both Stylesheets and TEI the dev branch is the default branch.

Peter

...
Am 03.07.2020 um 10:29 schrieb Nicholas Cole :

Indeed. And so we could pick any default name that makes sense. Which does raise a good question — which branch would we like the community to issue pull requests against. Presumably, in fact, ‘dev’.

N

...
On 3 Jul 2020, at 08:58, Magdalena Turska wrote:

From what GitHub has to say on the subject:

"The default branch is considered the “base” branch in your repository, against which all pull requests and code commits are automatically made, unless you specify a different branch."

Basically it's marking a branch as 'default' that makes it a default starting point, not its name. Explicit links for master would be most probably broken, so that's the price of change. Doesn't seem too high for me.

Fwiw, I do think that we should have a

1. formerly master branch renamed into main/stable/base/trunk whatever which effectively represents last release 2. dev branch for ongoing work aimed towards the next release which should always be 'stable', meaning nothing should be merged in that breaks the tests 3. feature/bugfix branches for work in progress, only when builds are successful for the feature branch a pull/merge request to dev should be approved

M

On Thu, 2 Jul 2020 at 19:29, Hugh Cayless wrote: My understanding is that "main" is the candidate default name (anyone who knows different should yell), and therefore GitHub might put in some affordances around that (maybe e.g. redirects from master to main? I dunno). So there *might* be advantages to choosing main. I quite like your idea of "stable" though. I guess "trunk" is another option too...

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 1:08 PM Elisa Beshero-Bondar wrote: That seems prudent to get to work on changing to a standard and inoffensive branch name now. Would our use of “main” vs. “dev” be consistent with other projects like ours that work on regular updates and release cycles? If so, I see no issue really with using “main” if that’s the one people get used to referring to as the latest stable version.

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 11:56 AM, Hugh Cayless wrote:

Would it make sense to try to do this (for TEI and Stylesheets) around the upcoming release then? We could create a "main" branch basically now (or immediately after we complete the fight about what to call it 😁) from master and then do the work to make sure everything ends up in main at release time, then remove master.

Hugh

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:47 AM Jessica Lu wrote: 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

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

...
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

...
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

...
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

...
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

On 2020-07-02 7:01 a.m., Hugh Cayless wrote: that person performative, but links

...
being the first one that comes to mind. What do you all think?

Hugh

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-- ------------------------------------- Humanities Computing and Media Centre University of Victoria mholmes@uvic.ca _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

-- Dr. Jessica H. Lu Associate Director, Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC) University of Maryland Honors College pronouns: she/her/hers 0121 Prince Frederick Hall (301) 405-2866 jhl.jessica@gmail.com | http://jessica-lu.com

As I strive to strike a reasonable work/life balance, you may receive emails from me outside of traditional working hours. Please do not feel any pressure to respond outside of your own working pattern. _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

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

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Scholger, Martina (martina.scholger＠uni-graz.at)

4:05 p.m.

Dear all, Thanks for bringing this up. To be honest, I was unaware that this could be such a sensitive topic. As a non-native English speaker I would never have thought of reading "master" (in the TEI-GitHub repos) in an authority/slavery context, but in the sense of a "master recording". I fully agree we should go ahead with this change. And, it doesn't seem to create too many necessary corrections and therefor doesn’t have too many implications on the next release. There is a recognizable trend towards renaming "master" to "main", so I would be somewhat in favor of following that. However, I agree that main is not very specific and "stable" might be a good alternative. I suggest to decide the issue (name of the branch, procedure, responsibility) in our next meeting on July, 14. This gives us exactly one month before the next release. Best, Martina -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Tei-council Im Auftrag von Nicholas Cole Gesendet: Freitag, 3. Juli 2020 10:34 An: Peter Stadler Cc: TEI Council Betreff: Re: [Tei-council] Git branch naming Sorry. I hadn’t had enough coffee. So in fact, the only question is what we should call the branch we use for releases, and it won’t affect the tool chain at all.

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On 3 Jul 2020, at 09:31, Peter Stadler wrote:

That is already the case. For both Stylesheets and TEI the dev branch is the default branch.

Peter

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Am 03.07.2020 um 10:29 schrieb Nicholas Cole :

Indeed. And so we could pick any default name that makes sense. Which does raise a good question — which branch would we like the community to issue pull requests against. Presumably, in fact, ‘dev’.

N

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On 3 Jul 2020, at 08:58, Magdalena Turska wrote:

From what GitHub has to say on the subject:

"The default branch is considered the “base” branch in your repository, against which all pull requests and code commits are automatically made, unless you specify a different branch."

Basically it's marking a branch as 'default' that makes it a default starting point, not its name. Explicit links for master would be most probably broken, so that's the price of change. Doesn't seem too high for me.

Fwiw, I do think that we should have a

1. formerly master branch renamed into main/stable/base/trunk whatever which effectively represents last release 2. dev branch for ongoing work aimed towards the next release which should always be 'stable', meaning nothing should be merged in that breaks the tests 3. feature/bugfix branches for work in progress, only when builds are successful for the feature branch a pull/merge request to dev should be approved

M

On Thu, 2 Jul 2020 at 19:29, Hugh Cayless wrote: My understanding is that "main" is the candidate default name (anyone who knows different should yell), and therefore GitHub might put in some affordances around that (maybe e.g. redirects from master to main? I dunno). So there *might* be advantages to choosing main. I quite like your idea of "stable" though. I guess "trunk" is another option too...

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 1:08 PM Elisa Beshero-Bondar wrote: That seems prudent to get to work on changing to a standard and inoffensive branch name now. Would our use of “main” vs. “dev” be consistent with other projects like ours that work on regular updates and release cycles? If so, I see no issue really with using “main” if that’s the one people get used to referring to as the latest stable version.

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

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On Jul 2, 2020, at 11:56 AM, Hugh Cayless wrote:

Would it make sense to try to do this (for TEI and Stylesheets) around the upcoming release then? We could create a "main" branch basically now (or immediately after we complete the fight about what to call it 😁) from master and then do the work to make sure everything ends up in main at release time, then remove master.

Hugh

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:47 AM Jessica Lu wrote: 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

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

On 2020-07-02 7:01 a.m., Hugh Cayless wrote: that person performative, but links

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being the first one that comes to mind. What do you all think?

Hugh

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participants (10)

Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Hugh Cayless
Jessica Lu
Lou Burnard
Magdalena Turska
Martin Holmes
Nicholas Cole
Peter Stadler
Raffaele Viglianti
Scholger, Martina (martina.scholger＠uni-graz.at)