ZFS Removes References to Slavery

> Like I've said though I think of 'master/slave' as perfectly fine descriptions regarding their function

I disagree with this. Master/Slave is in fact a pretty terrible description of most of these systems, and appears to have been shoe horned in.

In most master/slave systems the master does all of the work, and the slave nodes exist either for duplicate read capacity, or as a hot standby in case the master fails. This is not the way that historical masters and slaves interacted, to say the least. I believe that "primary/secondary" or "primary/standby" is actually a much better description of the actual function of these systems.

> white vs black, bright vs dark, , "shining bright light" vs "tempted by darkness", etc, it was almost a Eureka moment: "How can people think of skin color there?"

Some of those are tricky, because lightness and darkness is also a good faith description of how human vision works.

But who would see black and white as a description of skin color? Pretty much every American. There is some nuance to terms like whitelist and blacklist (that I have not yet made up my mind on, btw), but when it comes to naked terms like "black" and "white", that is exactly how Americans refer to each other's skin color.

Maybe it's different in your culture. Again, a lot of the people discussing these things are Americans talking to other Americans.

> 'because a black man was murdered by police in a country across the Atlantic, and now they are looking to prune any mention of slavery from everywhere they can find it'

That is a pretty poor explanation of the phenomena at hand. A better description would be "a murder of a black man triggered massive social upheaval and a society wide moment of soul searching about the nation's history both of slavery and poor post-slavery treatment of black Americans. This change has included everything from significant reversals in opinions on policing, the Black Lives Matter movement, the naming of military bases, public display of confederate monuments and flags, all the way down to an investigation of the use of language in software engineering."

The discussion around the use of terms in software isn't because "a black man was murdered", it is because America is experiencing massive social shifts around how we treat race in America. A discussion of how we name pieces of software is probably the absolutely smallest portion of a massive change.

I think maybe I didn’t make my point clear here. I don’t think that in these particular examples there exists racial bias in the language. The language (most languages) is biased (but not racially) towards associating darkness with evil and light with good. If you personally are experiencing racial bias due to having darker skin, I think language like this can feel very different than it would otherwise, even if the language itself is not explicitly racially biased. I’m not saying we should abandon the whole light/dark evil/good dichotomy, but just pointing out that things built in to the culture that aren’t technically related to race in any way may feel very different if you’re on the “good” side than if you’re on the “bad” side.

> It's not at all difficult to assume that something is offensive to someone, but not to me. It's extremely easy that for any different person, different phrases are considered offensive. But the solution of 'let's create a world where nothing is offensive anymore' seems ludicrous.

I agree that it seems impossible to avoid offending every individual. But, when it’s so easy to avoid using language that has negative connotations for a significant portion of the population, why shouldn’t we? Why cling so tightly to not being kind, out of some kind of slippery-slope assumption that if we give ground and have empathy this once, the word will end?

It’s really odd to me how offended people get by the suggestion that there might be something offensive about the language they use. I have no ties to the words I use. If I want to be friends with someone or to include them in what I’m doing, and they have a problem with some word I use because of some context that I haven’t experienced, it does me no harm to use a different word.

> I always thought there was a 'common sense' approach, pruning any mention of 'slave' as terminology in programming / system administration after decades of use for me seems to be extremely far away from it.

Here I think you’re taking offense at a situation that doesn’t exist. What I’ve seen is people trying to avoid perpetuating the problem by not adding new instances of the world slave to new code/systems, or making updates to use different language when it’s convenient and someone’s already touching the code. These actions hardly seem to me to be pruning any mention of the term from decades’ worth of software.

Language, it’s important to remember, is descriptive, not prescriptive. It is always changing along with society and culture. It’s therefore natural that what is considered acceptable or not is going to change over time, and we’ve always had to deal with this as a society. Look at people wanting to ban books for using words that have become offensive, as an example. The interesting thing about software, as opposed to books or words engraved in stone on monuments, is that it’s often very easy to change the words that are used, because software isn’t a historical artifact but a living thing. And as a living thing, people are going to want it to reflect their own current societal norms. So changes like this seem an inevitable part of a long-lived industry that creates such mutable products.

Regardless, it hardly seems worth getting so worked up over someone else choosing to make this decision in the codebase that they maintain. It is their right as maintainers to do so, and if you disagree so strongly with them making this small token of empathy, you can of course choose to use another filesystem.