We just had a fairly substantial discussion about maintainer burnout on the frontpage today and yesterday - I would ask, is this a good use of the patch reviewers' time? (I would say probably not.)

The cookie selection is wild. "Sicherer Ausgang" (in English: safe exit, and "Ausgang" is physical, as in leaving the building). It must be "Necessary only", but what exactly does that translate from?

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Fill volunteers time with useless wordplay, then they won't have time to do what they want to do.

Mind that this isn't some huge announcement of a new initiative within Microsoft/Linux or whatever. This is some commits/mailing list threads that the Phoronix guy decided to write an article about (often much to the chagrin of those having their offhand mailing list comments characterized in article form by a third party)

How are folks so comfortable with "target"? Doesn't that have strong connotations of warfare and attack?

(I don't actually care about this, just illustrating how much language is walled off by this kind of hypersensitivity)

Yes, this might be very offensive to people living in countries in war currently.

>For the most part the terminology within the code and code comments is adjusted from master and slave to instead using controller and target (or client).

So more useless changes to try and cure imaginary offenses?

Now for another glorious thread of Hacker News users getting pitchforks and torches over something they simultaneously insist doesn't really matter

It doesn't matter in the sense that changes like these help protect approximately zero vulnerable people on average every time they get implemented (but often cause major annoyances for others like when git changed the default branch name to main).

What does matter is that the moral busybodies pushing these changes have no intention of stopping there, and you have to keep them from getting a foothold in anything, which requires constant vigilance.

It seems to me that it's only the software industry that's intent on purging words. 'Blacklist' is still in wide use even on progressive news outlets.

And blacklist's origin has nothing to do with race. It was originally coinec to describe a list of people involved in the execution of Charles I.

Words are offensive if people believe they are offensive. It doesn't matter if it's a good reason or a bad reason.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...

The problem comes from the implied connotation: blacklist and whitelist -> black is bad and white is good.

There’s perfectly reasonable alternatives: allowlist and blocklist. It’s not really that big of a deal.

It’s about death by a thousand cuts. Nobody has suffered trauma by seeing those words. Nobody is going to refuse to work with you because you use those words. But they can be reminders, triggers, maybe just pain points.

If by slightly patching my vocabulary I can make some people more comfortable, why wouldn’t I?

> the implied connotation: blacklist and whitelist -> black is bad and white is good

Well, no. And you illustrate it so well:

> reasonable alternatives: allowlist and blocklist

If both statements are true, then "allow" is good and "block" is bad.

See, if there's any implication of value then it needs to apply to whatever words you choose to use. In reality, none of those can be qualified as good or bad. They're tools. As such, when put to good use, they will be good; when misused they might be bad. This is true for whatever (black|white|allow|block)list is used.

>It’s about death by a thousand cuts.

That's the truest part of your post, but not in the way you meant it. It's killing useful work and productivity via a death by a thousand cuts. I still have git push origin master in muscle memory, and have to regularly "fix" that to main, all because people with power over the git project insisted on changing the default branch name for made up reasons. Master refers to things other than master slave relationships, and even git's usage explicitly meant it in the slavery sense it was still a waste of engineering effort to change and an annoyance to anyone like me with muscle memory (or all of the people with build scripts they had to update).

Your point doesn’t make sense, because you can change your default branch just fine.

Man, it's a good thing I never have to work with repos created by other developers who used the new default branch name then! Not like on a daily basis or anything.

Yeah and the alternative Africanamericanlist seems more offensive.

I thought this stuff was mocked out of existence. They can't even use non-euphemistic language to describe the euphemization. "Make the language more inclusive" well its not more inclusive of masters and slaves. And the replacements, "controller and client" or "controller and target", are strictly less apt. Just dumb.

Target? Terrifying warfare connotations. Client? Smacks of historical patterns of subjugation (client states of empires).

Where does this end? Are we to become linguistically homeless, evicted from our verbal environment every time someone finds a way to be uncomfortable with it?

I'm uncomfortable with this line of questioning and demand that you cease immediately.

Wow, amazing what engineers can get done with all that extra productivity gained by not working from home. Go Microsoft! /s

It's no different from the HDD master / slave argument of old. Are we also going to stop calling connectors male and female? This is just common nomenclature. I don't think any offense was ever inserted when these terms were being created nor while they are in use today.

Unless there is good evidence that the guy who came up with the master / slave wording was intentionally doing it to remind people of slavery, (or something to that effect) there is no issue here. As for white / black list and male / female...just come on now. That's unreasonable and ridiculous.

Is this seriously what people are getting upset about? That the words white and black are being used? They're taking completely benign words and assigning malicious meaning to them where none exists. It's manufactured outrage. If you smell shit everywhere you look, check your shoes.

Frankly this just furthers the racial divide and I think it's done intentionally to keep up apart. This isn't progress, it's just more racism honestly.