RFC: Conscious language in the Binutils

[Gary Benson]

Hi all,

Jose E. Marchesi wrote:
> Nick Clifton wrote: 
> > Inside Red Hat there is an initiative to address some of the language
> > used in open source projects, making it more inclusive:
> >   
> > https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/making-open-source-more-inclusive-eradicating-problematic-language
[snip]
> 
> The blog post you link seems to describe an internal Red Hat policy in
> rather vague terms.

Eradicating problematic language isn't simply some internal Red Hat
policy, it's something that's happening all over the world, in free
software, nonfree software, tech, non-tech... everywhere.

GitHub changed their default branch name from "master" a month ago[1],
GitLab and BitBucket are changing too[2][3], Postgres did it last
year[4], and Python two years ago[5].  Django cleaned their codebase
in 2014![6].  FWIW I didn't look very hard for examples, you could
find more.

I approve these changes.  Today it looks strange to see "main" where
"master" used to be.  In 1, 5, 10 years time the reverse will be true.
It will annoy me typing "master" where I should type "main", but hey,
I still type "cvs" sometimes when I mean "git".   Make the change,
suffer a week readjusting your muscle memory, then thing back about
things a year from now and wonder what the fuss was about.

Seriously, does anybody have any actual concrete reasons to object to
this change?

Thanks,
Gary

-- 
[1] https://github.com/github/renaming/blob/main/README.md
[2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/221164
[3] https://bitbucket.org/blog/moving-away-from-master-as-the-default-name-for-branches-in-git
[4] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flata/E393EC88-377F-4C59-A67A-69F2A38D17C7@yesql.se
[5] https://bugs.python.org/issue34605
[6] https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692