In the grand scheme of things, it may not be a big deal to some people. I’m not one of them. Slavery and it’s history in the US, the proliferation of white supremacy groups coming out, public clashes and white power terrorists killing citizens—all reasons to make the effort.
Thus, I have been thinking about how to rename the common convention in git to use “master” branch. I started thinking about what does that one-true-source™ branch mean? Since I believe in semantic meaning for elements of development, my search led me to prime.
The macOS dictionary defines prime as:
- of first importance
- of best possible quality.
That sums up what I think of the branch to mean. It is the most important branch that all releases flow from and as code and software are always in flux and being refactored, that branch should be the current best quality of the code.
I’m not the first to bring this up, this issue for Redis to change master/slave terminology is a perfect example, and why I think it’s as important to put in the work making these changes as it is to tear down statues.
I use ‘main.’ One fewer syllable! As long as it’s treated as the default it kinda doesn’t matter what word is used, ‘prime’ seems perfectly fine too.