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

[Mehdi AMINI via llvm-dev]

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 3:31 PM James Courtier-Dutton <
james.dutton at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am more confused than anything else.
> There are whole areas of data design and management called "Master
> Data Management".
> In financial statements there is the expression "In the black" meaning
> a good positive figure in the balance sheet,


I'm glad to hear that there are positive uses of the word "black"!



> and "in the red" and a
> bad negative figure.
> So, for the confused people like me, I would prefer someone to come up
> with a list of words (and in what context) that are offensive, and
> then we can easily avoid them in future.


It is hard to have an exhaustive list, but I'm sure we can come up with a
list of resources to link to from our docs (coding standards for example),
I pointed to IETF doc
<https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-00.html#rfc.section.1.1> in
the original post, Google also has a doc on Writing inclusive documentation
<https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation>,



> I am sure, like me, that none
> of us wish or have ever wished to use offensive words.
> I get the feeling that people are having to guess at the moment, Is
> "xyz" offensive?
>

I am fairly confident that "xyz" is OK :)

Best,

-- 
Mehdi



>
> Kind Regards
>
> James
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, 19 Jun 2020 at 10:49, Mehdi AMINI via llvm-dev
> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> 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 as it can hurt some contributors, 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
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > LLVM Developers mailing list
> > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>
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