[tz] changing "master" to "main" in tzdb development repository

Clive D.W. Feather clive at davros.org
Wed Mar 17 14:43:09 UTC 2021


Brian Park via tz said:
> Personally, I'm not convinced that GitHub's push for this rename will make
> a meaningful difference for the underlying social problem,

Nor am I. I have more sympathy for getting rid of "slave", particularly in
the places where it's misused anyway, but I don't see that trying to
pretend the practice never happened helps.

Also, what happens to my masters degrees?

> but this is not
> too much work either.

I had to manage over 5000 changes to a document. It wasn't just a search-and-
replace because of all the places that "M" or "S" appeared in an acronym or
initialism and we weren't allowed to use replacement terms with the same
first letter *even* when they were innocuous and appropriate. (Thankfully
someone else did most of the detailed work, though I had to review it all.)

I'm wondering how many people will tell us we did a good job when the
document is re-released and how many will complain that their source code
now no longer matches the terminology, packet names, parameter names, and
so on that they've been using for the last 20 years.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather          | If you lie to the compiler,
Email: clive at davros.org     | it will get its revenge.
Web: http://www.davros.org  |   - Henry Spencer
Mobile: +44 7973 377646



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