Wow. This topic has generated a lot of comment. 

We at ISC decided in 2017 to provide aliases for the master/slave terminology 
in BIND so users who don’t wish to use those terms don’t have to.  It was not a 
burden to make this change in the source code. 

Back when we made that initial change, I personally received several private 
emails from actual BIND users who had felt triggered, offended or otherwise 
distracted by the master/slave terminology, thanking us for making this change. 
 If even one or two users were upset by the old terms, that is enough, and 
surely there are more users who were impacted who didn’t speak up.  

We are now in the process of updating the terminology used in the BIND ARM. 
These edits are in review now (along with many other updates to the ARM.)

At the time we made the initial change we didn’t have a process for removing 
obsolete features so we just added an alias. Now that we do(1), we would like 
to implement that process to gradually deprecate the master/slave terms in 
favor of primary/secondary.  We would introduce a warning in 9.18, mark the old 
terms as deprecated in 9.20, and remove them in 9.21 (development branch). So, 
the master/slave terms will still work in the 9.20 Extended Support Version 
through its lifetime, which ends at the end of 2025. This constitutes an 8-year 
period for this change, which should be enough for even the most change-averse 
among us to adapt. 

We are trying to ensure that this project is as inclusive as possible. BIND and 
the DNS are complicated enough without adding additional barriers. This seems 
like a reasonable accommodation. If this change (over the next 6 years) will 
cause you a signficant problem, please say so, but we don’t need to continue 
discussing whether it is worth the effort any more, because we are already 
convinced it is worth the effort on our part. 

Vicky Risk


Victoria Risk
Product Manager
Internet Systems Consortium
vi...@isc.org

(1) https://kb.isc.org/docs/policy-for-removing-namedconf-options



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