Re: Master-Slave terminology Re: [Piuparts-devel] piuparts.d.o stalled?

[Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org>]

On 2020-02-13 09:14, Timo Weingärtner wrote:
> Hallo Ulrike,
>
> 12.02.20 17:46 Ulrike Uhlig:
> > On 12.02.20 17:01, Nicolas Dandrimont wrote:
> > > In any case, since DSA had to restart everything at UBC, the piuparts
> > > slave got restarted as well and it's churning through the backlog.
> > > Unfortunately it looks like restarting the slave just eats its logs.
> >
> > I'd like to attract your attention to this very fine document:
> >
> > https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-00.html#rfc.section.1.1
> >
> > Quoting from there: "Master-slave is an oppressive metaphor that will
> > and should never become fully detached from history."
> >
> > As an alternative:
> > "Several options are suggested here and should be chosen based on the
> > pairing that is most clear in context:
> >
> > Primary-secondary
> > Leader-follower
> > Active-standby
> > Primary-replica
> > Writer-reader
> > Coordinator-worker
> > Parent-helper
> > "
>
> I don't think giving slaves new labels helps them in any way; they will 
> still
> be slaves.
>
> Or do you intend to actually liberate them?
> If yes: how? which liberties are they supposed to gain?
> If no: then you're actually helping the slave owners hiding their 
> wrongdoings.

Regardless if you buy the premise of racism in language, the 
alternatives suggested are actually quite instructive: You can use names 
that are actually more descriptive and do not invoke bad memories, i.e. 
it's a constructive proposal. The same is true for blacklist vs. 
whitelist as mentioned in there, for which allowlist and rejectlist are 
terms that actually describe what is happening in most contexts.

Of course communities also build up some slang to see who is "in" the 
group and who is "out". But it actually makes things more accessible to 
others if you describe things as they are.

Kind regards
Philipp Kern