I always thought it took, pretty directly, the 1st meaning in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/master_copy, which does fit the ultimate definition as it's the copy all of the edits follow from until they are merged at which point they become the new master edit and the following edits become based off of it. Same of branches, just on a large scale of edits.
Main (or most any other common primary branch name) can have equally trivial confusions that are not actual problems. The endless debates about branch names didn't come about because people were so confused we needed something else to stop the madness, they came about because people were convinced they could find a problem to need to fix. Any of these branch names work equally fine, it really doesn't matter and there is no deeper logic needed to justify why we switched.
Yes, switching standards is confusing and taxing.
Although, using bad standards is also confusing and taxing.
Usually those taxes are internalised somewhere and forgotten, becoming a hidden tax. They become apparent once pointed out, like when trying to fix a standard or switching to a new standard, but they exist nonetheless.
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> you'd have to be an obsessive to think that hard about minor language choices to the point of forcing a change on tens of millions of people after-the-fact.
No, it's not mis-managers throwing their weight around, it's not culture war, it's not etymological one-up-man-ship, it's not politics, it's just systems theory.
Every time someone gets stung by a hidden tax in a system, and the cause of the sting can't/won't be addressed, it builds up pressure.
If the pressure can't be relieved, it continues building to the point that the system starts to strain. Eventually the system reaches the point where the strain has to be released and there's a sudden change.
Systems theory.
I really hate how people pretend to be stupid and not know that master means a lot of different things: "animal owner", "an expert", "a tradesman", "postgraduate degree", "original", and many others (including dated definitions). Wiktionary lists 21 definitions, only one of which is slave owner.
It lists two which references "slave".
Definition 2 references slave owning, but that's irrelevant to the actual discussion here.
This thread is talking about definition 17:
> (engineering, computing) A device that is controlling other devices or is an authoritative source. > > Synonyms: coordinator, primary > Antonyms: secondary, slave, worker
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> I really hate how people pretend to be stupid and not know that master means a lot of different things
"Master" meaning different things is exactly the problem.
Even if we limit ourselves specifically to definition 17, it still means too many things. It's overloaded to the point that it doesn't accurately describe the systems where it's used.