Re: Proposal: Replace all references to master/slave in GNOME modules

[Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org>]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 9:10 AM Carmen Bianca Bakker
<carmen carmenbianca eu> wrote:
> Specifically the Git master branch is a bit of a problem. I personally
> think that "trunk" is a much better term, but I do not have _that_ much
> of a problem with the word "master" in this context to do away with
> convention.

I very much agree with this. It's not the greatest term, but there is also value
in conforming with existing conventions, and "master" isn't quite bad
enough(*) to
justify breaking that.

In particular I'm thinking of documentation. git is a complicated
beast with a steep
learning curve. Changing the name of the default branch means we differ from
almost all(**) existing documentation. The change itself may be small, but it
adds some extra friction to an already frustrating learning process.

I know I'll easily adapt to a new name if the project decides to go
ahead with the
change. But it would certainly have been a problem for younger-me, struggling
to get my head around git and following documentation without fully
understanding
what a particular command does in detail ...

Cheers,
Florian

(*) in this context. I'm all for replacing "master"/"slave" references
where we can.

(**) I'm assuming that gitlab's UI picks up the configured name in its
interface,
   and that the people pushing for this change will update the GNOME wiki