Re: DEP-14: renaming master to main?
On 24-06-2020 12:56, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> Colin Watson dijo [Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 10:13:31PM +0100]:
>> I think my ranked preferences are:
>>
>> 1. devel (for the sorts of reasons smcv@ gave; also, debian/devel is a
>> nice allusion to this list)
>> 2. trunk (historical familiarity from other VCSes)
>> 3. main or maybe mainline (some tab-completion similarity to master,
>> though the confusion with components in a Debian context is
>> unfortunate)
>
> I never really understood the word "trunk" when I used older
> VCSes... Because, as a non-native English speaker, I always understood
> "trunk" as the part of the car you store stuff in.
>
> The "right" meaning is quite obvious, and it makes much more sense
> when expressed together with "branches": What in Spanish we call
> "tronco" (should be a giveaway! How come I never understood it
> before?), the core part of a tree. Thing is, in English I always used
> the word "stem" for it.
>
> I'm only sending this message to help explain the term to other people
> who might find it odd. So, a DVCS is a tree, and you can follow the
> _trunk_ to find its "core" or "main" development direction.
>
> There are many _branches_ splitting, first from the trunk itself, then
> from other branches.
>
> So, trunk makes quite a bit of sense for me in that light.
Just a though inspired by Gunnar email.
I am not a native English speaker and I should admit that I always felt
cold about the discomfort people reported in the use of loaded terms
such as slave/master. I am a physicist and those terms are used a lot in
the literature and they always felt "normal". So normal that it is
common practice to use these English words in technical communication
also in my native language.
Recently I started translating them in my head into my native language
every time I read them. I felt immediately different and I felt ashamed
I contributed to support their used in many articles I wrote.
These English words are used so often in a metaphoric sense that my
brain registers the neologism as the main meaning rather than the other
way around. I feel think kind of normalization of the terms worrisome.
I am trying to understand if a similar mechanism exists for the
perception of gender pronouns (another issue I feel I am not completely
understanding, despite wrongly identifying my gender from my name is a
fairly common occurrence) for persons whose native language has gender
for all pronouns (usually assigned in what may seem a random way) and
thus the fact that there is a gender associated with personal pronouns
is somehow diluted.... I haven't come to a conclusion yet.
Cheers,
Dan
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