
Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code - mds
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article243876977.html
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bdcravens
In discussions about this on social media, there's significant push back from
those who are actually affected by the issues BLM is fighting for, who feel
moves like this are more white guilt with no real change for what really
matters. I'm sure an at-risk youth, when pulled over by two white police
officers, is grateful that a bunch of highly paid programmers aren't subjected
to politically incorrect variable names.

(edited: I referred to this group as "BLM core", but I realize that's
confusing to some)

~~~
Jabbles
Please provide a link to support your assertion that "the BLM core" is giving
"significant push back".

~~~
neltnerb
Why would anyone waste time complaining about this, especially BLM organizers?

~~~
bdcravens
The feeling of shallowness. It's the equivalence of a corporation showing
their support for DREAMers by adding tex-mex options in the company cafeteria.

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LeoPanthera
I feel like I'm in the minority that thinks this is a good idea.

I can easily see how some people might be made uncomfortable by the existing
wording, but more importantly, _I can see no downside_ to changing it.

It will be a very small amount of work for a very small amount of time and
then everything will carry on as normal. If this helps make programming more
inclusive, even in a small way, then I'm all for it.

~~~
entropea
How does it help black individuals though? Like how does it improve their
lives, police brutality & prison reform, poverty, water quality?

~~~
Jabbles
If you agree with their premise that "some people might be made uncomfortable
by the existing wording", surely removing it helps those people?

Is this the last remaining piece of racism in our society? No.

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IfOnlyYouKnew
Wow, this community is terrible. It's good to see that the people who matter
are more advanced: Wikipedia is also (finally) doing this, as I noticed today.
And so is Github.

It's a renaming of mostly internal identifiers, a somewhat minor change for
those implementing it, and a complete non-issue for anyone else. It doesn't
matter if you are offended by the terms or not. Your opinion is somewhat
irrelevant for once.

The logic of why people may feel offended by master/slave or white/blacklist
is trivially obvious. One can have doubts about the intensity of it, but not
the basic mechanism.

Additionally, this issue has grown in salience precisely because people
opposed it.

Agitating against such changes is just as emotional as the proponents are
accused of being, only the justification is far more transparently dishonest
considering the relative ease of this change as outlined above.

People will invariably profess to be willing to help overcome the lingering
effects of hundreds of years of slavery and continuing racism. But when they
get the chance to do so, with the barest minimum effort, it's not going to
happen.

Not because anyone is racist, of course. No, this is about ethics-in-
datastructure-identifiers.

~~~
Zenbit_UX
> The logic of why people may feel offended by master/slave or white/blacklist
> is trivially obvious. One can have doubts about the intensity of it, but not
> the basic mechanism.

My companies black systems architect just finished a whitelist feature and
delivered it this morning. Should I, as a dutiful white frontend dev, inform
him:

a) that this was in fact a racist decision and he may be a racist or
rationally motivated.

b) that he's been oppressed by the whiteman for so long that he doesn't even
know how racist this is, thus awakening his mind to the countless micro-
aggressions around him

c) do nothing, because this is stupid virtue signaling by marketing teams
fueled by white guilt ridding the wave of a woke-movement that, at worse, will
get them a neutral "whatever" response or some scoffs, and at best, a pat on
the shoulder from the woke twitter-verse?

Please let me know of your selection by reply and I will carry out the
appropriate action and report back.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
This is the I-have-a-black-friend excuse that tends to elicit slightly
shameful laughter from the audience these days. I didn't know people still
used it.

In any case: it: your college does not single-handedly represent all Black
people. Assuming that he does is the same basic mechanism as pointing at one
red-haired criminal to support your theory of higher criminality among
redheads.

The disadvantaged group of any discrimination also isn't itself exempt from
actively perpetuating that structure. It's almost a cliché, for example, that
female leaders sometimes act extremely aggressive, especially with female
employees, in an overzealous effort to fit in, or to dispel any notions of
nepotism.

~~~
Zenbit_UX
> This is the I-have-a-black-friend excuse that tends to elicit slightly
> shameful laughter from the audience these days. I didn't know people still
> used it.

No, it's actually nothing like that at all but I can see how tempting it was
for you to make a false equivalency in order to support the point you wanted
to make anyway.

In actuality, it's a very real and current example of how my colleague, the
guy who directs all the devs at our organization and happens to be black
doesn't give a shit.

> The disadvantaged group of any discrimination also isn't itself exempt from
> actively perpetuating that structure.

I see, so option b then. A balsy choice to be sure, I have to wonder if you'd
have the stones to mansplain to your black supervisor that he or she is
perpetuating a racial system. Based on your choice I'm going to go out on a
limb here and guess you're also perpetuating a stereotype, that of the white
guilt avenger. Please do correct me and explain why I'm wrong and a bigot
though.

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slipheen
One thought that I had seen elsewhere on this subject really stood out to me.

When these phrases are being replaced, their replacements are almost always
more descriptive terms for that specific project, and the way those servers
interact.

For example- In Jenkins you run a "master" which schedules jobs, and "slaves"
which run the jobs. After they updated their terminology, they referred to the
job-runner as a "Agents."

This makes it much clearer what the relationship is between them, and
clarifies that the "Slave" servers aren't some sort of failover server, which
is how a DB might use the same terms.

I've seem other projects use primary/replica, and several other variations,
but they almost always seem to be much better fits for what the software is
actually doing.

~~~
dingaling
One has to be careful though, because in espionage the 'agents' are non-
professionals bribed or coerced to do the dangerous dirty-hands work. They're
expendable and deniable.

Many, many words hold additional meanings that aren't obvious to the
mainstream.

------
Dig1t
Google is also mass refactoring internally as well, blacklist/whitelist are
now blocklist/allowlist and so on. It's quite a bit of churn.

~~~
imglorp
This one kind of bothers me. Dark and light are concepts from long before
written history and have nothing to do with humans even. Predators and bad
things hunt in the dark, evil, etc.

There's really no benefit to meaningless conflations of human social problems
with other things.

I agree with the other comment about assuaging white guilt; it doesn't help
someone get hired, talk to the police, or find housing. Those are the issues
we need to work on.

~~~
ogre_codes
> I agree with the other comment about assuaging white guilt; it doesn't help
> someone get hired, talk to the police, or find housing.

You make it sound like this is a bunch of white people unilaterally doing
something so they feel better. As if there are no black programmers asking for
this change.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-
racially...](https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially-
loaded-tech-terms-like-master-slave/)

The whole point of this effort is to make the workplace less hostile for
people we work with. Black programmers are part of that.

~~~
imglorp
Yes, that's a good point about needing to create a welcoming workplace, so
maybe this discussion is more of a spectrum where we need to decide where the
line is?

Guidance would help instead of everybody guessing or corps randomly scrubbing
things until the bad PR goes away.

~~~
ogre_codes
> Guidance would help instead of everybody guessing or corps randomly
> scrubbing things until the bad PR goes away.

I'm having trouble seeing an issue black developers have been raising for over
a decade being called "Randomly Scrubbing". It's been a known pain point for
some time.

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simion314
IMO if you change this terms with even better ones(that are more clear and
more specific for the domain) then is great.

~~~
cs02rm0
How do you do that when you have an established word an entire industry
understands?

Words only have the meaning we convey to them and as soon as you put more
words in the mix that dilutes any clarity. We're back to the xkcd on
standards.

~~~
simion314
I am not an english speaker, for example "black list" is a concept that
translates worse then "blocked list" , the first requires you have some local
or historical context the last one is just clear as day.

~~~
cs02rm0
Block has multiple meanings in English. You don't need historical context, but
you'll always need context.

~~~
simion314
Sure, so what I am thinking as an example is when we create new code, say I
have a feature that is available for users that have account of type A,B,C but
not D or E , so I always do something like let allowedPlans = [A,B,C]. isn't
this more cleared then if I named the list whiteListedPlans ? IMO is more
clear and it translates better.

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redog
Why not owner or subject?

Are accountants not to refer to master records?

Do we have to stop killing child processes?

~~~
secondaryditto
"I'm just waiting for Maria to kill her children" is a valid tech sentence,
but probably not something that should be uttered in a public setting. :)

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fooblat
I worked for redhat in a past life and I recall having to do this for
documentation back in 2003-2004 to comply with a California law[0] regarding
vendors to the government.

It's been a long time but I'm pretty sure I remember changing "master/slave"
to "primary/secondary" in a bunch of bind docs.

0\. (this might be it)
[https://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.re...](https://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/)

~~~
treebornfrog
I feel as though primary/secondary doesn't define the relationship properly.

I, for one, think this is all getting ridiculous now.

~~~
fooblat
The chosen terms don't define the relationship. The documentation defines the
terms in the given context, including their relationship.

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Zenbit_UX
We live in the dumbest time-line.

~~~
stronglikedan
I'll drink to that!

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LatteLazy
This is a huge challenge for HN: can we treat this as the minor issue it is,
and discuss it patiently and kindly?

~~~
sdinsn
> can we treat this as the minor issue it is

Is it actually an issue at all?

~~~
LatteLazy
I don't think so, but some of the other comments here (including the top one
when I commented originally) felt it was very very important and anyone not
supporting immediate action was a racist...

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jjj1232
I’d ask every white person who says they don’t like these changes because
they're shallow/pandering/not as good as real antiracist action to take a step
back and ask yourself if that’s the real reason you dislike this change.

Is it possible you actually had a knee-jerk reaction to PC-ness and are
retroactively justifying it with logic?

I think it’s common for people (maybe especially engineering types?) to have
an emotional reaction to something and find a logical reason for that emotion
instead of admitting that maybe they were just being reactionary in the
moment.

~~~
HappyDreamer
Definitely not just engineers -- that's how all humans function across the
whole planet.

That is, humans act based on feelings, and rationalize afterwards with logic
(like you wrote).

And some of the "logic" in this topic, is quite weird I have to say.

(Personally I like most of these changes, e.g. "replica" or "standby" instead
of "slave", also more clear & precise what it means?)

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stuff4ben
I remember talking to CloudBees reps back around 2013 when we were going to
purchase Jenkins Enterprise licenses and they made a conscious effort to refer
to build slaves as build agents or build nodes. I applauded them at the time
for that even though there is still a lot of referencing of "slave" in
documentation and blogs. I don't have a problem with "master" but I do have a
problem with "slave" and I'd like to eradicate it.

~~~
ghastmaster
Why do you want to eradicate it?

