For what? Main isn’t better if the issue is racism, because “main” has some really negative connotations in Korea (“main” families having servant families).
And, for crying out loud. the tools name is literally a mild british swear word.
What makes it worse:
- Each "bad" term gets replaced by multiple alternative terms, often non-obvious, so good luck figuring out what people mean now. For example, MitM (Man in the Middle) was a well established technical term. Everybody knew what was meant, the term had no acutal gender association in the meaning, but now you instead read "machine-in-the-middle, meddler-in-the-middle, manipulator-in-the-middle, person-in-the-middle (PITM), or adversary-in-the-middle (AITM)".
- The "it's more descriptive" excuse was used as a very thin veil of justification even though the actual reason for the change was clear. So not only do you get to deal with the extra hundreds of hours of overhead, but you also have people lie to your face about why you're being forced to do that.
- It never ends. First it was "master/slave", then "master" in any context, and once that battle was "won", proponents of such policies started finding new "offensive" words.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack#Notes
When one is willing to discard that connotation, then, if anything, “default” would be a more accurate name, because the fact that it is selected by default in certain situations is really the only technical difference compared to other branches.
The whole branch naming thing is still only half implemented fwiw. Lots are still master, the default for new branches seems to be main. At my company it is “develop” for git.
Other VCS software uses a totally different name, perforce uses main for example.
I don’t really care what it was, it could have been “killwhitey” and I still would have been against changing it because of the effort involved in changing every repo on earth and the invalidation of every tutorial in existence.
