A friend just shared this article on The Register that states Linux is committing to inclusive language.
From the article:
A Git commit adopted changes recommended by kernel developer Dan Williams, with the result that Linux will no longer refer to masters, slaves or blacklists.
In their place coders will be expected to use alternatives such as “primary” and “secondary” relationships, or refer to “leaders” and “followers”, or even “directors” and “performers”.
Blacklists are to become either “denylists” or “blocklists” and whitelists will become “allowlists” or “passlists”.
Torvalds’ commit was made on July 10th and said he thinks there’s no need for the change to wait for the next merge window for a new cut of the Linux kernel.
Top comments (11)
I like passlist/blocklist! Way more explicit :D
Allowlist/Denylist on the other hand feel like a mouthful.
The alternatives to master/slave don't convince me though.
I think main is the best replacement for master. Short and clear.
But I haven't found yet an alternative for slave that doesn't feel over-complicated, too long or insufficient. Maybe secondary? 🤔
If english is not your first language, this seems much more intuitive that whitelist/blacklist which is doesn't seem like it would be intuitive if you weren't aware of this phrase in the first place.
In Italian we have "lista nera" which is colloquially used as "blacklist". We do have the opposite concept, "lista bianca" but it's much, much more rare in its usage.
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian have same thing as I wrote. I just forgot to mention that it's usually used as list of "people to remove" or list of people you hate, has no racial impact just a word from the old age and most of our devs use modified english words as ours sound silly to us
Actually not allways, depends on the language. In my native language we also called it "black list"(translated has a space). Reason is that my country never had balck people so no one found it offensive or noticed a problem with it. However blocklist would sound silly translated back and closest sane translation would mean "list of blocks" where denylist would make a bit more sense as "list of forbids".
Torvald approvingg that and not fighting it, what a great day to be alive.
No doubt! Definitely gives me hope, and hope has been hard to come by recently.
@bigj1m ain't that the truth! It seems like yesterday that Linus was taking a leave of absence to process his bad behavior on the kernel mailing list. Progress!
Yeah and I want to believe him. It was more than overdue to apply some break on his toxic behaviour
For "master/slave", it largely depends what we're talking about. I quite like "active" and "passive (or replica)" for distributed systems work, but the connotation of "master" with "master copy" is a hard one to shake.
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