Re: Consensus on a new default branch name

[Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email>]

Hi,
My key point was to pass on the references. I appreciate that US law is
a bit peculiar (to European eyes).

On 02/07/2020 22:59, Whinis wrote:
>> The earliest claim I can find is from 2003, verified at Snopes in 2007
>> [1] and reported in 2003 at [1] (and elsewhere)
>>
>> I would not expect that the original complaint had been withdrawn. I
>> don't know if the relevant US/local laws have changed.
> Not exactly proof in this sense nor proof they had an actual grievance
> as someone in US law might tell you.

The point there was that it was, at the time, a complaint that had a
response which was passed into the community.

> Sadly it was rather recently a lawyer would go around claiming to be
> disabled or speak for an unnamed disabled citizen and sue every single
> restaurant they came across for ADA violations. Same was done recently
> with a Lebowits but for copyright law where its easy as a lawyer to
> sue continuously to get an easy settlement until you are disbarred.
> Even from that link the official that wrote the memo said
>
>> “I do understand that this term has been an industry standard for
>> years and years and this is nothing more than a plea to vendors to
>> see what they can do,” he said. “It appears that some folks have
>> taken this a little too literally.”
>>
>> Sandoval said that he had already rejected a suggestion that the
>> county stop buying all equipment carrying the “master” and “slave”
>> labels and had no intention of enforcing a ban on such terms with
>> suppliers.
>>
>> A recent blog post on racial bias in AI [2] highlighted that "Algorithms
>> are our opinions written in code",  just as many of our naming
>> conventions are implicit stand-ins for unsurfaced opinions and biases.
>>
> There is a great deal of misunderstanding on the "bias" in AI and in
> AI in general. I think you may have linked the wrong comment as [2]
My error in failing to renumber that correctly.

> goes to a BBC story on the same story as the snopes article. However
> if you are talking about the recent depixelator it was shown to have
> similar performance if you darkened the images. This is not a bias its
> a technological limitation as darker images have less contrast on
> facial features, its also a well known issue in photography where its
> difficult to get enough dynamic range to properly expose an image with
> both darkskin and light skin individuals. Outside of extremely
> expensive cameras that even professional photographers don't want to
> use the technology is not in the hands of people to take proper photos
> with the needed dynamic range. This is also why lighting in films and
> TV are so important.
>
> I feel a great many people want to attribute bias due to lack of data
> whenever no bias exists.
Today an article highlighted the issues and difficulties with data sets:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.16923.pdf
>
>> One area that is far more obvious in the UK, is the use of euphemisms
>> and innuendo, which can be grossly misused. It is quite easy to create
>> subtlety different phrases which actively discriminate that wouldn't be
>> noticed except by the careful or 'in the know' listener.  This can
>> easily be done with 'master' in Git.
>
> Unless you are making some allegation that anyone using the word
> master is racists 

It's the *misuse* that's racist

> or that somehow every technical field is inherently racists I have no
> idea why you are claiming its the same as actively discriminating. Or
> maybe you are trying to say the UK using its euphemisms is trying to
> be covertly racists?

Racists in the UK (and elsewhere) do use euphemisms and subtleties to
perform "vicious signalling".

> It would do well to clear up this confusing reference as it currently
> could be seen as insulting or making implications which clearly do not
> exists.
>
>>  From a comment in [3], the link [4] provides details of the association
>> of 'master' with 'slave' in Engineering literature, beginning in 1904
>> for a pendulum & clock arrangement. In electronic clock circuits it
>> wasn't till 1966 the use extended to flip-flop circuits, while hydraulic
>> master/slave cylinders started in 1959.
> I am rather unsure why you are reference either.
The original US case was with reference to the joint use of
master-slave. That Jstor article may be behind a log-in wall, so I
extracted from the essay, for immediate readers, some of the initial
uses of that term pair in engineering.

> Maybe you mixed up 2 and 3 because 3 has nothing on master or slave
> but as you have mentioned its orthogonal since git has no slave
> branch. 4 is a admittedly short paper as the author recognized that it
> could be its own doctoral thesis and only did a cursory search
> although many are using it as proof that no references exists prior to
> this time. It also adds its own heavy biases as mentioned in the paper
> while gill was the first to use the slave reference that they can find
> it was used for many years without much discussion and even when
> challenged it was determined it would be better than a much wordier
> alternative because it would be better understood. The paper also
> claim that Gill would be disapproving of the words use however has
> nothing to back this up considering they not only used the term but
> appearntly did so for many years afterwords at lectures.
>
>> The other issue is that Git doesn't do unique masters anyway. If you
>> have the correct commit hash you have a perfect, indistinguishable
>> replica of the original object - It's not a master (in the old 'version
>> control' sense) any more, so we don't need that name for local clone's
>> branch, unless it happens to be copied as the remote tracking branch.
>> Though that is orthogonal to this discussion.
> How does each commit have a perfect indistinguishable replica of the
> original?

Your a08a83db2bf27f015bec9a435f6d73e223c21c5e, my
a08a83db2bf27f015bec9a435f6d73e223c21c5e,
https://github.com/git/git/commit/a08a83db2bf27f015bec9a435f6d73e223c21c5e
: Which is the "master copy"
> My understanding is each commit is a record of changes compared to the
> last. As such only the first commit is truly 'perfect'
It's that Git is *distributed*, rather than a single central source of
truth that old version control systems used. I remember the smell of
blueprints, and of kaolin & linen master drawings (unique works of art,
protected and valued). That has all gone. It now a case of validating
the copy you have same hash. The chain of evidence has reversed.

>
>> As I understand the change process, this will not be the catastrophic
>> change many are suggesting. Existing repositories will still continue
>> working. New repositories will have options for choosing the defaults.
>> The usual level of great care over backward compatibility is being
>> taken.
> Is it? Because it seems to be that its waved off as a necessary cost
> of changing "outdated" language.  Being that its been used now for at
> least 110 years

Gits choice is only 15 years old.  There have been other changes to Git,
and the forthcoming hash change is much more of an 'impacts everyone'
change. Any direction of travel always includes some changes, generally
for the better.

> and being that its the understood vernacular and multiple projects and
> scripts assume, even if wrongly, the master branch is the one you
> should work from means changing this default is not usual great level
> of care. Certainly main seem to think its as simple as changing the
> letter and nothing will break. Sadly that rarely true
>
>> Anyway, that's the back story, with references,  that I've been able to
>> track down. Hope that helps.
> Unfortuntely no as the references being asked for is who this change
> actually impacts. We could go to twitter but that has it owns biases
> and every issue on this topic outside of this mailing list is either
> locked or biases by assuming it must change and leaving out master or
> tainted due to brigading. Just based on what I have anecdotally seen
> however most of the people pushing for this change is not the affected
> minority group its claimed to help.
>
Most progress comes through imperceptible changes, made in the
appropriate general direction.

Philip