By the way did you know that the etymology of robot? Wikipedia has this to say
> The word robot was introduced to the public by the Czech interwar writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), published in 1920.[79] The play begins in a factory that uses a chemical substitute for protoplasm to manufacture living, simplified people called robots. The play does not focus in detail on the technology behind the creation of these living creatures, but in their appearance they prefigure modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. These mass-produced workers are depicted as efficient but emotionless, incapable of original thinking and indifferent to self-preservation. At issue is whether the robots are being exploited and the consequences of human dependence upon commodified labor (especially after a number of specially-formulated robots achieve self-awareness and incite robots all around the world to rise up against the humans).
> Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator.[79]
> In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři ("workers", from Latin labor). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested "roboti". The word robota means literally "corvée", "serf labor"
If anything, the article affirms my gut feeling when I first started using version control back in the day. It didn't occur to me someone else might feel similarly.
When creating a new repo using Mercurial, the default branch is called default, which always made more sense to me.
Interestingly enough, both Mercurial and Git were created by Linux kernel hackers to handle the Linux kernel source code after the Linux project could no longer use Bitkeeper. They were released 12 days apart in April 2005.
Just pointing out that certain things, even seemingly small things, are often assumed to be okay. And especially in team settings, people don't always feel comfortable speaking up or being that person.
Reminds me of the aphorism: There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
https://twitter.com/vaidehijoshi/status/1271555823139876864?...
All CI/CD pipelines, scripts, tools. Integration fixes, regressions and failed deployments because branch was main not master.
Turns out that Git’s use of master decends from a use that is about master/slave: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...
It could be argued that by default, Mercurial discourages rewriting history unless you really want to and you know what you’re doing.
So the definition of a ‘master’ branch is more applicable to Mercurial than it is to Git.
Determining whether a given use of the word is appropriate requires context and careful consideration, and people already tend to have a bunch of work on their plates! For something like "master" I think it's reasonable to go "let's just not use it in our repos, there are alternatives", it's not erasing any useful nuance or meaning.