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

[James Courtier-Dutton via llvm-dev]

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, 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. 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?

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
>
>
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