The issue is that no one is taking my words out of context to get offended. No one is getting offended because I said things. They are getting offended because of their own situation, that I just happened to have brought up. If someone in the military had PTSD because someone yelled “Duck!” and then a grenade blew up right near them, so now they have panic attacks anytime they hear someone loudly say duck. That isn’t them “taking the word duck out of context” that is “the word duck affects their brain differently.” No one is saying that using the word master makes you a mean malicious person. No one is accusing you of being on the attack trying to hurt people when you use a word without realizing how it impacts others. If a military vet was like “hey I have severe anxiety when someone says duck, can we say ‘leave early’ instead of ‘duck out early’”. I would be like “oh shit, i didnt realize. my bad, yeah, of course” not “YOURE TAKING MY WORDS OUT OF CONTEXT I HAVE THE RIGHT TO USE THOSE WORDS”. If you know the word hurts others and then you double down and insist on using it, then yeah, you’re on the attack because clearly you don’t care that you are hurting people.

It’s pretty easy to tell a good faith argument most of the time. You don’t need to just blindly accept the opinion of all people. “Hey this word is heavily associated with slavery and makes people think of slavery” is pretty striaghtforward. Thats not a purely bad faith argument.

I don’t know all who you think is “insisting” on the “master/main” change. Everyone I’ve talked to has been like “yeah, if we could that’s cool.” or likened it to more of a “its like if someone reminded you daily of that time you accidentally called the teacher ‘mom’ … having it go away would be nice, but if it doesn’t oh well.” No one is crying over it or making demands. The only “insisting” is just people questioning why the slight suggestion results in so much pushback.

It seems like your only reason to not change is “because someone asked me to and I’m too stubborn and reject any decision that wasn’t my own.” At least “changing a branch name on the worlds largest repo has consequences” is a valid reason. But “I refuse to listen to others”… cmon.

Because there are words that have less violent associations that can still capture the relationship sought to be described.

[Stop using Nazi, war]

Those aren’t used for computing though. And, yeah, I think if we did we probably should. Like if terms related to genocide were used for stopping a lot of processes at once that would be pretty weird to me.

[death]

Kill is used to refer to stopping processes and that’s probably where the line is in my opinion. It feels very different to me to say “kill a process” versus “genocide a group of processes”

@lowleveldata In general, I would say yes, it’s better not to use “Nazi” as a metaphor for otherwise everyday activities where there are plenty of unobjectionable alternatives.

I don’t know that trying to divorce it from context and find a general rule is particularly helpful, though. It’s not just “alternate” definitions, it’s the primary definition for most people that the industry adopted.

I don’t know the history of who started the master/main debate. if it was a bunch of white people trying to show how progressive they were while black programmers were like “yeah, we don’t care”, then it’s virtue signaling. If it was the black programmers being like “this phrase feels weird to us… can we change it?” … then it’s not virtue signalling, it’s listening to underrepresented voices. I legitimately don’t know which scenario it is. I’m also not in a position where the word bothers me at all, but I also have an easy life, and if someone tells me a word used in a certain way feels weird and I can resolve that with 0 effort (ie, switch new projects to main), I will.

And of course about the retroactive changing, which is why I said I wouldn’t expect linux to change.