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

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Message-ID: <058cea17-7009-c3e9-8c58-9b9ef44b85eb@gmail.com>
Date:   Wed, 8 Jul 2020 13:51:01 +0300
From:   Pavel Begunkov <asml.silence@...il.com>
To:     Stephen Hemminger <stephen@...workplumber.org>
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 08/07/2020 06:42, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> 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.

And that's a perfectly convincing argument for a change -- consistency makes
it easier to work with specs and code. I've never said anything against.

I care about arguments being logically sound, as yours are. And the author
neither provides such, nor IMHO actually helps the issues it raised.

-- 
Pavel Begunkov