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ZFS Removes References to Slavery

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Re: ZFS Removes References to Slavery

#111

Post by manuelaljibes »

Separo wrote: post #66

I knew there would be these petty comments in here. For people who in general work in such an intellectual and ephemeral pursuit there is so much pathetic clinging to meaningless terms. The computer does not care. It's only the human beings in the community that do. And it's our choice whether to be neutral and inclusive or miserly trolls clinging to meaningless out of date terms coined in times when these weren't co…

Sure, let's completely modify our environment so that the first-world sensitive twats that can't deal with words don't feel threatened, better yet, let's outright ban words that describe anything that is remotely related with dominance, because that is unsensitive and "non-inclusive" with those whom their ancestors were oppresed at any point in the past 5000 years

Re: ZFS Removes References to Slavery

#112

Post by [deleted] »

rambojazz wrote: post #110
there_the_and wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, all of you bitching and moaning about your precious master / slave terminology are the most triggered. If you can't handle a name change, then software is absolutely not the career for you.

wtf? You people created a problem that didn't exist before, and now you're attacking people for not caring about a non-problem? The origin of the work "master" is not "oppression" and "slavery", it's simply "control" or "authority". If you don't understand this, and if you think that others should care because you are offended by a non-existent problem that you have created, then software is absolutely not the career…

[deleted]

Re: ZFS Removes References to Slavery

#113

Post by geofft »

MauranKilom wrote: post #103
geofft wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the funny thing - in almost all contexts I've seen the "master/slave" terminology, it's not actually technically clear. In some contexts (e.g. Jenkins), a "master" tells the "slave" what to do and the "slave" does it. This at least is plausibly connected to the real-world meanings of the term, although given that the "slave" can start and stop work at any time and the "master" needs to accommodate that, the an…

> [Jenkins] "Coordinator/worker" works well here. Agreed, although my mind immediately went to "manager" and how that is one of the most useless names. See e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1866794 . Need to be careful with this type of naming. > [MySQL] "Primary/replica" works well here. Agreed. > [ZFS] Terms that would make sense include things like "bond device/bonded member" (the members being bonded to ea…

For bonding devices I usually say "bond" and "member" at work, or things like "I added eth4 to bond0," which seems at least as clear as "I enslaved eth4 to bond0". For disks I usually write and say "LV" and "PV" for LVM and "LD" and "PD" for MegaRAID, which matches what the respective CLIs use.

Re terminals, it's the end that's connected to the monitor (or terminal emulator), just like the other end is connected to the application/session. There aren't two actual pseudoterminals in any sense, just two views of the same thing, so the idea of "the pty master"/"the pty slave" doesn't quite make sense unless you're very careful to realize you're talking about the open FD and not the actual thing. I'd probably say something like "the monitor end" and "the session end" (and continue to abbreviate them as "ptm"/"pts").

Re: ZFS Removes References to Slavery

#114

Post by dependenttypes »

qeternity wrote: post #109
dependenttypes wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these seem quite a bit worse than slave to be honest. Why not use server/client instead? Edit: another post in this thread suggested master and puppet, I think that this is a cute yet clear variant.

I wasn't saying they were worse. I was replying to a concern that we will end up with multiple names that mean the same thing. I mean, this is modern technology...it seems like only the hardware guys can manage consistent naming, and even that is slipping. On the software side? I can only think of rare things which don't have a half dozen synonyms.

> I wasn't saying they were worse

I.. know? I would not say that they are worse if you had said it yourself after all.

Re: ZFS Removes References to Slavery

#115

Post by oliwarner »

manuelaljibes wrote: post #108
oliwarner wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure... But why not remove imagery of slavery from tech syntax? We have plenty of other organisational terms to denote a higher rank. What's wrong with those? They might even be more accurate. I don't suppose DBAs get in a ship to pillage and loot foreign lands for their database redundancy. I see too many people arguing semantics or historical bias, or whataboutisms but barely anybody giving positive arguments to pr…

There's no technical reason to make this change, it's an annoying change with literally zero positive impact on the world, this won't abolish slavery nor will it help anyone, it may help the promoters of this stupidity to feel better about themselves, like "look at us! we are aligned with the PC agenda! We're sooo progressive and docile!"

No technical reason, but clearly a political reason. And politics matter in an open project where diversity and collaboration are so important to their long-life goals.

You don't agree —and that's fine— but does it harm you to rename it? That is past the initial inconvenience of it not being the word that it's been before... Is that any more inconvenient than the other API changes that almost all software goes through at some point?

I can understand some light grumbling, but I don't see why people get so bent out of shape they feel the need to start summarising slavery through the ages.

"It's just a word" swings both ways.

Re: ZFS Removes References to Slavery

#116

Post by geofft »

um_ya wrote: post #95
pacala wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title right now: 'ZFS Removes References to Slavery'. Probably 95% of the commenters have not read TFA in sufficient detail to argue minutiae details. They see 'language changed in support of the dominant political current' and link it to Newspeak because that's the only frame of reference most people are aware of. It's not like it's an isolated incident, there is plenty of language redefinition, history rewritin…

Not to mention the compelled speech in Canada, in regards to gender pronouns.

This is a legal hypothetical advocated by Jordan Peterson and not actually ever demonstrated in reality / tested in court / etc., right? (That is, neither Peterson nor anyone else has said that they were compelled to speak in a certain way and there are no legal proceedings against anyone who has refused to speak in a certain way, right?)

Re: ZFS Removes References to Slavery

#117

Post by mikecoles »

Separo wrote: post #66

I knew there would be these petty comments in here. For people who in general work in such an intellectual and ephemeral pursuit there is so much pathetic clinging to meaningless terms. The computer does not care. It's only the human beings in the community that do. And it's our choice whether to be neutral and inclusive or miserly trolls clinging to meaningless out of date terms coined in times when these weren't co…

"meaningless terms" - It's also our choice to avoid working with those who exhibit theatrical intolerance and objection to such "meaningless terms". "Embrace other people's experiences" such as what? How many in the IT field have experience as a master or slave (other than kinks)? None.

Pointless changing of words because of "feelings" is why the majority is laughing at you behind your back. If there is something you want to change, go for something with meaning. Stupid things like this illustrate that there is no issue and you need to make up problems because there are none.

Re: ZFS Removes References to Slavery

#118

Post by mikecoles »

xupybd wrote: post #58
ashtonkem wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My general take has been that we should probably avoid these terms moving forward, but that the technical cost of going through nearly a century’s worth of technical stack and fixing every last reference is probably a pretty technically risky operation.

Technically risky yes but worth it. Inconsistencies in naming make code horrible to work with.

Perfect reason to leave the terminology as it is.

Re: ZFS Removes References to Slavery

#119

Post by mikecoles »

pacala wrote: post #73
geofft wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newspeak removes terms from language so that certain ideas cannot be expressed. This pull request does concern language, yes. But it retains the use of the term "slave" in existing APIs, while updating a script that is named "slaves" to use the term "deps," a term that is already used elsewhere in the API. At the end of the pull request, both terms remain meaningful. Furthermore, no attempt is made to hide previous u…

The title right now: 'ZFS Removes References to Slavery'. Probably 95% of the commenters have not read TFA in sufficient detail to argue minutiae details. They see 'language changed in support of the dominant political current' and link it to Newspeak because that's the only frame of reference most people are aware of. It's not like it's an isolated incident, there is plenty of language redefinition, history rewritin…

It's not the "dominant political current'. This is a ripple cause by loudmouths. The dominant current is moving in the direction of actually getting work done.

Re: ZFS Removes References to Slavery

#120

Post by soganess »

deogeo wrote: post #46
quasarj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's nothing discriminatory about killing. We kill everyone eventually!

Slavery is not exclusive to black people either.

Your right, it's insensitive to every people group that's been enslaved for any period of time. Yet somehow that doesn't encompass all people groups in the same way that kill does. Maybe we should be considerate of all peoples/individuals who have experienced slavery directly or in their ancestry.

My Swiftian Proposal: lets just remain all uses of the word "slave" to "forcedChildLaborer". It's more accurate anyway, since in software a "slave" is usually "born" into the role and often times doesn't live very long. We are striving for accuracy after all, right?

And for my two cents that will inflame this even more: We should considering deprecating the use of "kill" to signify terminate. I haven't used it in my 15+ years of writing software professionally and no one has impugned my code quality for not using "kill" enough.

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