linux-kernel - Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [Tech-board-discuss] [PATCH] CodingStyle: Inclusive Terminology

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Message-ID: <20200707204241.36bea66a@hermes.lan>
Date:   Tue, 7 Jul 2020 20:42:41 -0700
From:   Stephen Hemminger <stephen@...workplumber.org>
To:     Pavel Begunkov <asml.silence@...il.com>
Cc:     Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
        ksummit-discuss@...ts.linuxfoundation.org,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        tech-board-discuss@...ts.linuxfoundation.org
Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [Tech-board-discuss] [PATCH] CodingStyle:
 Inclusive Terminology

On Tue, 7 Jul 2020 02:03:36 +0300
Pavel Begunkov <asml.silence@...il.com> wrote:

> On 07/07/2020 01:28, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > On Tue, 7 Jul 2020 01:17:47 +0300
> > Pavel Begunkov <asml.silence@...il.com> wrote:
> >   
> >> Totally agree with you! But do we care then whether two _devices_ or _objects_
> >> are slave-master? Can't see how it fundamentally differs.  
> > 
> > The term slave carries a lot more meaning than subordinate. I replied to
> > someone else but later realized that the person sent me their reply
> > offlist, so my reply to them was also offlist. What I told them was,
> > back in college (decades ago), when I first mentioned "master/slave" in
> > conversation (I think it was about hard drives), a person in that
> > conversation stated that those were not very nice terms to use. I blew
> > it off back then, but after listening to more people, I found that
> > using "slave" even to describe a device is not something that people
> > care to hear about.  
> 
> That's cultural, but honestly I've never seen such a person. I still
> don't understand, why having secondary or subordinate object belittling
> the owned side by not providing it the same rights and freedom is OK,
> but slave/master objects are not. Where is the line?
> 
> 
> > 
> > And in actuality, does one device actually enslave another device? I
> > think that terminology is misleading to begin with.  
> 
> As mentioned, I do like good clear terminology, and if it conveys the idea
> better, etc., then it's worth to try. And IMHO that's the right reasoning
> that should be behind. Otherwise, for almost every word we can find a person
> seeing something subjectively offensive or at least bad in it.

Wherever possible the kernel should use the same terminology as the current
standard in that area. Many of the master/slave references in the networking
code are for protocols based on IEEE 802 standards (unfortunately paywalled).
The current version of those standards do not use this kind of wording and the
standards committees are also actively working on inclusive language statemets.

As far as the use of master/slave for bonding, bridge, team etc, it
looks like Linux just invented using those terms since I don't see it
any other vendors implementations Cisco/Juniper/Arista/... Linux terms
are different than industry norms in networking, this is not a good
thing. But changing human expectations is hard.