[Spice-devel] Identifying and removing potentially divisive language

[Victor Toso]

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 01, 2020 at 10:03:10AM +0200, Kevin Pouget wrote:
> 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

Not a native english speaker but I've read a few discussions
around the user of master as git as in master copy instead of
master/slave. Another examples of the use of master from native
speakers included master as in school teacher or someone that is
in charge of something (the offense being where the subject of
control is the slave).

Still, I don't really mind to changing it to main, even more if
there are people that feel this can really be offensive in some
way..
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