On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:14:26 +0100 Christian Heimes <christian@python.org> wrote:
On 10/03/2021 10.30, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 10:30:43 +0900 Inada Naoki <songofacandy@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 10:10 AM Ivan Pozdeev via Python-Dev <python-dev@python.org> wrote:
On 10.03.2021 3:53, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 11:47 AM Damian Shaw <damian.peter.shaw@gmail.com> wrote:
> Does 'master' confuse people? There's a general movement to replace language from common programming practises that derive from, or are associated with, the dehumanization of people. Such as master and slave, as well as whitelist and blacklist.
Is that *actually* the origin of the term in this context, or is it the "master", the pristine, the original from which copies are made? There's no "slave" branch anywhere in the git repository.
It is, actually, the ultimate origin of the term.
A more immediate origin is the master-slave architecture (the master agent initiates some operation and slave agents respond to it and/or carry it out).
Petr Baudis (who named "master" branch) says its origin is "master recording". So it is unrelated to master-slave. https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441
And the origin of the English word is the latin noun "magister": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/magister#Latin
Words change meaning.
Definitely. But if one wants to make a historical argument, it cannot stop at one point in history ;-) In any case, "main" (or hg's "default") is certainly a better generic word for the concept than "master". Whether or not it's worth breaking many pieces of automation out there I'm skeptical about. Regards Antoine.