That is an awful lot of contortions you are doing here, to seemingly justify a word change that has had well-cemented meaning within the tech community since it's inception.
We all know why this change exists, and why some people will attempt to persuade others of it's superiority. It is, however, just silly virtue signaling, and it's exhausting to hear and read.
It would require some very irrational and underdeveloped reasoning to assert this word has anything to do with oppression in 2023. There is no negative connotation, except in those who wish to perpetuate some weird sensation of altruism... ie. no one is safer or feels better simply because you choose to call it "main" rather than "master".
But it is truly a pain in the neck that different pieces of software and even different distributions of the same software now disagree about the default.
I’ve got a handful of active projects that go together that differ on master/main because they were created by different softwares.
I’d prefer “hitler” if everyone could just agree to always pick that. GitHub are the big pushers of this culture change. If they succeed, I salute them.
I'm willing to go out of my way to use a different word if it makes people feel better (the root of the master -> main transition). But this is the rare case where it benefits me by having to type two less characters whenever I refer to the branch! main is truly a win/win.
> I'm willing to go out of my way to use a different word if it makes people feel better
Which is just the thing, really. It makes no one feel better. It makes the privileged speaker feel better, with a false sense of virtue. It's a "look at how great I am" signal, nothing more.
No one is harmed or made to feel bad by using the word master. Sometimes the adults have to be present in the room, it seems.
Saving 2 characters is an equally silly excuse, but at least it has a realistic rationale. To that end, why stop at main - why not just 'm'? You can call it whatever you want in git.
It's because main is a goldilocks word for something like a default branch name. It isn't too long and isn't too short. It also isn't shorter in terms of syllables.
We all know why this change exists, and why some people will attempt to persuade others of it's superiority. It is, however, just silly virtue signaling, and it's exhausting to hear and read.
It would require some very irrational and underdeveloped reasoning to assert this word has anything to do with oppression in 2023. There is no negative connotation, except in those who wish to perpetuate some weird sensation of altruism... ie. no one is safer or feels better simply because you choose to call it "main" rather than "master".