[llvm-dev] Inclusive language in LLVM: can we rename master branch? (original) (raw)

Philip Reames via llvm-dev llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Fri Jun 19 10:39:24 PDT 2020

+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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