Before we change from master to main though we should wait until it's clear that this is the naming the general git community is going with and for tooling to change. Essentially wait for Github to migrate away from the “master” branch name. Which they announced here:
https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1271253144442253312
Yeah I was aware of them looking into it, and that's fair enough. I had settled on 'main' because it's short, and because it also starts with 'ma' (making it a bit more friendly to my autocomplete-reflexes :)). But happy to wait until Github announce their preference.
There are other references, direct or indirect, to the master-slave concept. One instance is the master node in elasticsearch. We also reference the same concept in the NativeStore.
Not sure what we can do about elasticsearch, it's up to them to change that. But yeah, the native store is worth fixing. It's an internal-only reference I think, so not hard to change in a non-breaking fashion.
I still think that recommending our users to donate to the cause is a good thing. Changing the branch name from master to main is already taking a political stance. A great one, if I may add.
There's a difference. Naming things in our own project is what we as developers do, and have every right to do. Choosing branch naming conventions is no different than naming methods or classes: it's our code base, our rules (within the larger framework of the Eclipse Foundation's code of conduct of course - I don't think they'd thank us if we started calling our main branch "nazis are great" :)). We simply make a choice, as project maintainers, to name things in a way that we consider best (in this case: 'best' being 'more inclusive'). However, endorsing a specific charity or political organization is definitely something that goes beyond what we are about as a software project, and we also have to keep in mind that as a project we represent the Eclipse brand to some extent.
