Re: Proposal: Replace all references to master/slave in GNOME modules

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2019-04-25 at 11:46 +1000, Michael Gratton wrote:
> 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?

This email was really difficult to read because of the layout of the
proposal, and how the response to feedback was formatted. I had to scan
it 3 times to find what you wanted to rename the main git branches.

+1 on the sysadmins doing the git changes project-wide
+1 on tracking master/slave usage project-wide and removing it

What your proposal doesn't touch on is what to do when the master/slave
usage is out of our control, and legacy, especially when it comes to
hardware.

I feel that it would be better to not touch those, and come up with a
statement that could be used in documentation to explain their usage.

Cheers