[llvm-dev] Inclusive language in LLVM: can we rename `master` branch?

Fri Jun 19 11:40:28 PDT 2020

Do we have any ability to reach out to github (at least?) to see what they are going to do?  I’d very much like to avoid being the odd-project-out here.

From: Eric Christopher <echristo at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2020 11:32 AM
To: Keane, Erich <erich.keane at intel.com>
Cc: Petr Penzin <penzin.dev at gmail.com>; Mehdi AMINI <joker.eph at gmail.com>; llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] Inclusive language in LLVM: can we rename `master` branch?

There's really no guarantee that things will shake out the same in near term between the projects.

-eric

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 11:31 AM Keane, Erich <erich.keane at intel.com<mailto:erich.keane at intel.com>> wrote:
I’m a bit mixed on this.  While yes, we should change this as soon as is practical, it would be a shame to pick something sufficiently different from the rest of the world, as that would be anti-inclusive (though in a technical way).  It would be REALLY good if we knew what github/git were GOING to name theirs and just do that as soon as possible.

From: Eric Christopher <echristo at gmail.com<mailto:echristo at gmail.com>>
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2020 11:23 AM
To: Petr Penzin <penzin.dev at gmail.com<mailto:penzin.dev at gmail.com>>; Mehdi AMINI <joker.eph at gmail.com<mailto:joker.eph at gmail.com>>
Cc: Keane, Erich <erich.keane at intel.com<mailto:erich.keane at intel.com>>; llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>>
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] Inclusive language in LLVM: can we rename `master` branch?

While I appreciate this sentiment we should not block our changes on a project over which we have no control. Changing the name and the documentation is easy and we should do this today.

Thanks.

-eric

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 10:49 AM Petr Penzin via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:

+1

Git uses `master` branch in quite a few places in its docs and `git init` produces a `master` branch. ideally, a change to git should drive all of this - that way there would be no confusion.
-Petr

On 6/19/20 10:45 AM, Keane, Erich via llvm-dev wrote:
I agree with this.  As much as I dislike the name that I believe github will choose, we should just do whatever everyone else is doing.

Note that in addition to the github discussion, there is some extensive discussion on the .git mailing list (IIRC) about choosing a new name as well.  I hope github waits until that choses a name as well.

From: llvm-dev <llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org><mailto:llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org> On Behalf Of Philip Reames via llvm-dev
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2020 10:39 AM
To: Mehdi AMINI <joker.eph at gmail.com><mailto:joker.eph at gmail.com>; llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org><mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] Inclusive language in LLVM: can we rename `master` branch?

+1 to the notion of changing the branch name in general.

However, I think there's a practical aspect which needs considered.  Currently, "master" is the defacto convention used across many, many projects.  There's currently a lot of conversation going on across many projects about naming.  I think it's really important that rather than just picking something that we wait and see what the new convention is, and adopt that.  I've seen reporting that GitHub is considering changing the default name for new projects.  If that does end up happening - I hope it does - I think we should use whatever name they pick.  Convention is critical for ease of use of new contributors.

Philip

p.s. There's a bunch of other terminology in use which is potentially problematic, but I'm intentionally restricting my response to this one.  I think each deserves discussion on it's own merits.
On 6/19/20 2:48 AM, Mehdi AMINI via llvm-dev wrote:
Hi,

When we moved to GitHub a few months ago, we used without more consideration the "master" convention to name our development branch. On SVN it used to be just "trunk".
This naming is unfortunate<https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-00.html#rfc.section.1.1> as it can hurt some contributors<https://dev.to/afrodevgirl/replacing-master-with-main-in-github-2fjf>, and there is really no technical advantage that I know of to favor this convention over another.

I am perfectly aware that `master` has other significations than the master/slave meaning, and I personally never made this association in the past. However I'm also able to recognize that I'm privileged here, and that not everyone is in the same position.

As we intend to be an inclusive community, I propose that we change the name of our development branch and that we adopt instead a more neutral terminology for the LLVM monorepo. Possible names are "dev", "trunk", "main", "default", ...

We need to plan a transition as all the bots will need to be updated to track this new branch instead, but these are minor technical details, nothing compared to the SVN->Git migration we went through.

Since I'm on this topic, we should also likely look into the pervasive use of whitelist/blacklist in the project.

Thoughts?

--
Mehdi

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