Proposal: Replace all references to master/slave in GNOME modules
- From: Michael Gratton <mike vee net>
- To: Desktop Devel <desktop-devel-list gnome org>
- Subject: Proposal: Replace all references to master/slave in GNOME modules
- Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2019 11:46:57 +1000
Hi all,
I'd like to formally propose as a GNOME Goal that GNOME modules replace
references to the terms "master" and "slave". This is a worthwhile
thing to do for social inclusiveness[0]. Many FOSS and non-FOSS
projects, including Django[1], Python[2], and Rust[3] and the ISC[4])
have already implemented similar programmes and it would be good for
GNOME to do so also. The scope would be to replace occurrences of the
terms appearing in the user interface, web sites, documentation, APIs
(except as deprecated symbols), and git repositories - essentially
wherever a person using or developing software for GNOME may reasonably
encounter them.
By way of background, I recently did just this for Geary[5] after a
request via private communication. The work was essentially trivial,
and it has been a relatively painless transition. A number of people
have positively commented on the change, and no one has objected to the
UI or API changes, however some feedback has been received about
renaming the mainline branch, broadly falling into essentially three
categories: 1) It doesn't matter, 2) it's inconvenient, and 3) it
should be done project-wide, not piecemeal.
To respond to that feedback, which I imagine will also be raised for
this proposal, I'd suggest that (1) is clearly not the case - yes it
doesn't matter to many people, but it does matter to some, and that's
the whole point of making a project more socially inclusive - to make
it better for everyone. The issue raised by (2) is not a new problem -
we already have to remember project names, branch names, file names,
symbol names, and so on. To make that easier we have tooling support
(auto-completion in both GUIs and TUIs, the ability to set things as
defaults, code symbol lookup, etc.). Further, disruption can be
minimised by carefully choosing replacement names. I deliberately chose
"mainline" for Geary's mainline branch name because it has the same
auto-complete prefix as "master", for example. Want to check out the
mainline branch? Just type "git co m<TAB>", just like you always have.
Lastly, if adopted project-wide, then we'd all get used to the new
names rather quicky. Finally, to respond to (3) I am proposing it
project-wide now.
To summarise, let's replace the use of these deprecated terms in our
project as a step towards making GNOME a project that everyone wants to
use and develop for. Who's in?
//Mike
[0] -
<https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/Language/NonSexist/vuw.non-sexist-language-guidelines.txt>,
<https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/933011085594066944>
[1] - <https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692>
[2] - <https://bugs.python.org/issue34605>
[3] - <https://github.com/rust-lang-deprecated/rust-buildbot/issues/2>,
<https://github.com/rust-community/foss-events-planner/issues/58>
[4] - <https://twitter.com/ISCdotORG/status/942815837299253248>
[5] - <https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/geary/issues/324>
--
⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>
[
Date Prev][
Date Next] [
Thread Prev][
Thread Next]
[
Thread Index]
[
Date Index]
[
Author Index]