[VOTE] Switch 'master' to 'main' branch for repositories

[David Woodhouse]

On Sun, 2023-03-05 at 23:02 -0300, Fernando Frediani wrote:
> It may seem a little thing now but it may have the potential do open 
> doors to other bad things in terms of expression. As mentioned example 
> is important, even in the smaller things.

The idea that this sets any kind of precedent is completely bizarre.

Language changes *all* the time. Words which were polite and
acceptable, especially those we use for certain minorities and
disadvantaged groups of people, eventually end up being considered a
derogatory term and considered unacceptable.

FFS, we've even seen *charities* having to change their names because
the name they originally chose, in love and understanding for the
people they were helping, was now considered unacceptable.

This is nothing new.

I appreciate that a of people in our field don't see it, but language
comes with emotional subtext. Some normies... sorry, so-called
"neurotypical people" have such a disability in this area that they
can't even hold a coherent conversation and stick to the point without
getting side-tracked by the emotional inferences they're making all
over the place.

And yes, I'm completely on board with the eye-rolling at this sudden
objection to the word "master", and privately of course I'm thinking
the same as many of us... "they're taking random emotional inferences
at *WHAT* now?".

But that's just normies for you. They do that. Always have, always
will. Can't help themselves.

We can't do anything about the fact that language changes, because
people take pointless emotional subtext out of it. We can only refuse
to change with it, in a way which makes us look increasingly tone deaf
and eventually just outright nasty and bigoted. In the same way that a
nonagenarian using a word for a racial minority which was *polite* when
they grew up, sounds like a fairly awful person if they still use the
same words today.

We aren't ahead of the curve here in switching away from the word
'master'; it's not like we're encouraging something which otherwise
might not happen. That ship has sailed.

Despite the pointlessness of it, that language *is* changing, and while
the term 'master' may have had no actual subtext when we first used it,
our refusal to change *would* send a very clear message. One that as a
group, we should be ashamed of sending.

We need to change it, and we need to stop the moronic hand-wringing
about an evolutionary process that has been part of language
development for as long as we've had language.

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