Given the motivation for this change -- will the same people be advocating that we must refer to main in HDDs that are in a RAID configuration? Seems a touch over-sensitive in my book.
'main' is a better choice because it's shorter -- it's also a keyword in many C based programming languages that programmers are inherently slow to write/override. They should have been the stated reasons.
I think in that context "slave/master" is much worse than just "master node", as it's explicitly that relationship. In the ATA spec for example, the master/slave terminology no longer appears:
You've haven't solved the problem though -- just kicked the can down the road -- somebody could come along explain that their offended by the terms "primary" and "secondary" as it implies one is above the other when they prefer to see equality and no offence caused.
When that happens you'll find yourself in the same position as us now who are saying the term "master" when discussing source control or HDD configuration is appropriate. Perhaps the answer is to understand that not everything is offensive even if interpreted initially that way. Nor does someone who claim to be offended actually have more skin in the game or more to their argument.
Sure, but I don't think the prevailing argument here is that any offense no matter how small should be catered to.
To produce a silly hypothetical, how about if anti-vaxxers got really upset about the phrase "code injection"? Even though anti-vaxxers are a worryingly large subgroup who've managed to return us to the days when measles is a thing to worry about, I still think that general cultural perception is such that everyone would roll their eyes at this complaint.
Rather, for "master" and "slave" and "blacklist" and whatnot, it's that enough of a groundswell of awareness occurred in general society that a lot of people started to feel awkward about the use of a term. It's akin to how "negro" used to be a perfectly acceptable descriptive word, but if you used it in casual conversation now you'd get a negative reaction even though it's not the bad "n-word".
We can't separate the current drive to replace slavery-related terms from the last few years of events in America. There's been a lot of events which have driven home to people that, yes, Black people in America are still having a rough time -- and in America, that inexorably ties to the historical reality of slavery.
A lot of these replacements are symbolic, driven more by a desire to say "hey, we accept you! you are welcome in our community" than any severe offense at any particular term. But symbolic things matter in aggregate.
And use of the acronymn RAID should be phased out as it is insensitive towards nordic people, the ancestors of whom spent centuries raiding European coastal towns. A bloody history they would rather move on from.
> will the same people be advocating that we must refer to main in HDDs that are in a RAID configuration?
Are drives commonly referred to as master/slave in that context? With the exception of when hot spares are present the drives in each array are considered equal (unless perhaps you have some arrangement where all parity information is on a subset of the drives). Maybe during the initial build process if you are converting a single drive to an array (for instance by adding a mirror to convert to RAID1) you might call the original drive the master, but this is in the context of a master tape rather than a master/slave allusion and even then I think I would have naturally called it the "source" drive instead.
The last time I remember referring to a drive as "master" was back when pre-SATA drive interfaces where dominant and you had up to two drives per interface cable.
'main' is a better choice because it's shorter -- it's also a keyword in many C based programming languages that programmers are inherently slow to write/override. They should have been the stated reasons.