It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology’s problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.
is that used anywhere but old ide interface disk drives. is it even relevant anymore?
It’s used in Cisco networking and Red Hat bonding that I know of. Changing it to primary/secondary IMHO is better and more clear.
I likely have not been in a large enough setup to encounter that. Usually just one router and the bunch of switches.
Embedded systems run into this a lot, especially on low level communication busses. It’s pretty common to have a comm bus architecture where there is just one device that is supposed to be in control of both the communication happening on the bus and what the other devices are actually doing. SPI and I2C are both examples of this, but both of those busses have architectures where there isn’t one single controller or that the devices have some other way to arbitrate who is talking on the bus. It’s functionally useful to have a term to differentiate between the two.
I’ve seen Master/Servant used before which in my experience just trips people up and doesn’t really address the cultural reason for not using the terms.
Personally I’m a fan of MIL-STD-1553 terminology, Bus Controller and Remote Terminal, but the letters M and S are heavily baked into so much literature and designs at this point (eg MISO and MOSI) that entirely swapping them out will be costly and so few people will do it, so it sticks around
FINALLY, a comment about IDE drives! Master/Slave is correct in terminology and function for IDE drives.
There’s the “master” branch in git, often named “main” now. In distributed systems, there’s often “master” and “slave” nodes, often named “primary” and “follower”/“replica” now
I mean master on git is a stretch but honestly it would make way more sense for it to be like trunk given the whole branch thing. I honestly never see master and slave node but rather primary and actually usually secondary.
The master branch in git isn’t the same though. It’s closer related to the word “remaster.” Master used to mean the original document is still used everywhere in tech and outside of it.
Main makes more sense since a master copy should be something that doesn’t change in my opinion. But that’s semantics…
