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

[Tanya Lattner via llvm-dev]

Mehdi,

Thank you so much for bringing his up. Personally, I agree with many points you have brought up and I appreciate you taking the time to write this email to the community. 

Just an FYI, but Mike Edwards is talking to Galina and folks about the “cost” of the technical changes to bots/CI and should have something to share about that soon. This information could be helpful when making a decision. 

Thanks,
Tanya

> On Jun 19, 2020, at 2:48 AM, 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 <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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