GitHub has decided to abandon the name "master" for primary branches.

Nat Friedman, Head of GitHub confirmed The company intends to default to using the name 'main' for primary branches instead of 'master' in solidarity with protesters against police violence and racism in the USA. The new name will only be applied to new repositories; existing projects will retain the 'master' branch name. However, there is discussion about preparing an option that would allow individual developers to automate renaming for existing projects if they wish.

Discussion on the need to move away from the term 'master'
is unleashed and on the Git developers' mailing list. Currently, only a few activists are actively supporting this idea, while most developers oppose it, especially since 'master' in Git is used separately and not in conjunction with the term 'slave'.

However, a true triumph of political correctness is observed in the OpenSSL project, where participants deemed the expression 'black magic' unacceptable. OpenSSL developers are considering the inclusion a patch, are replacing 'black magic' with 'magic', 'blacklist' with 'block list', 'white space' with 'whitespace', 'master' with 'parent' or 'main'.

In addition to the initiatives mentioned recently OpenZFS and Go, several other recent renamings can be noted:

• In Chromium accepted changes, they replace mentions of 'blacklist' in file names and code with 'blocklist' (user-visible mentions of 'blacklist' and 'whitelist' were changed in early 2019). In Android
• they are replacing began 'blacklist/whitelist' with 'blocklist/allowlist'. is working
• Проект Node.js on replacing blacklist/whitelist with blocklist/allowlist, but the change has not yet been approved. The Curl project
• replaced the mention of 'whitelist' with 'skiplist', 'select', or 'skip', and 'blacklist' with 'blocklist'. Ansible developers
• are considering the possibility of replacing the 'master' branch with 'devel'. In the PHPUnit code,
• they replaced Blacklist with ExcludeList, including changing the file PHPUnit/Util/Blacklist to PHPUnit/Util/ExcludeList. Among the communities that have refused to use master/slave in recent years are the projects

CouchDB Python, Drupal, Django, Salt, . In the BIND DNS server, the option to use settings with the names 'master/slave' remains, but alternatives with 'primary/secondary' were added and deemed more preferable. Linux kernel developers once called attempts to rename 'blacklist/whitelist' nonsense and foolishness instigated by politicians and populists, and, MediaWiki, PostgreSQL and Redis. The BIND DNS server has retained the ability to use the settings with the names "master/slave," but has added alternatives with "primary/secondary" and declared them more preferable. The developers of the Linux kernel once described attempts to rename "blacklist/whitelist" as nonsense and foolishness imposed by politicians and populists, and abandoned make a replacement, explaining that the term 'blocklist' will lead to misinterpretation and does not exclude perception as a 'list of block objects'.

The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), which is responsible for developing internet protocols and architecture, proposed alternatives to the terms 'whitelist/blacklist' and 'master/slave', preferred for use in specifications — instead of 'master/slave', it is recommended to use 'primary/secondary', 'leader/follower',
'active/standby',
'primary/replica',
'writer/reader',
'coordinator/worker' or
'parent/helper', and instead of 'blacklist/whitelist' — 'blocklist/allowlist' or 'block/permit'.

Source: opennet.ru