[Spice-devel] Identifying and removing potentially divisive language

[Kevin Pouget]

Hello SPICE community,

following Chris Wright (Red Hat CTO) blog post on "Making open source
more inclusive by eradicating problematic language" [1], I would like
to suggest that we have a look at SPICE source code to find out if/where
such language is used and how to remove it.

To illustrate the motivations of this move, consider the phrase "the
final solution". I am quite sure you would agree that these words
cannot be used inside a project. You would agree because the WWII
events are still in minds and not so ancient yet.
Git "master", or the "master/slave" pattern may not trigger similar
thoughts if your ancestors didn't suffer slavery;
"whitelist/blacklist" neither, if the color of your skin doesn't get
you into trouble (white=allow, black=deny).
Overall, I would advise, when thinking about these questions, not to
forget on which side your history/country/skin color/sexual
orientation sits you. If it's the oppressor side, you're not at the
right place to say it's not relevant.

---

I had a quick `grep` look at SPICE code base, searching for
`blacklist/whitelist/slave` and I could only find very few occurrences
of these words, which is nice. Can you find other problem words?

`master` is used for git default's branch, but not much
elsewhere. Let's discuss if we could get rid of this one, for instance
changing it to `main` (just a suggestion). I don't think that it can
break that many things (only the CI comes to my mind, where the
`master` branch may be treated differently) as git name default
branch's name is often omitted in the usual workflows.

Please share your thoughts about this

best regards,

Kevin


1:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/making-open-source-more-inclusive-eradicating-problematic-language
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