Eric, Thank you so much for the support and for stepping up offering to work on this. I am super +1 on this. Let's give folks a few more days to chime in, in case there is anything to discuss before we get cracking!
(Really) Thanks, Carlo On Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 10:38 AM Eric Badger <ebad...@verizonmedia.com> wrote: > Thanks for writing this up, Carlo. I'm +1 (idk if I'm technically binding > on this or not) for the changes moving forward and I think we refactor away > any instances that are internal to the code (i.e. not APIs or other things > that would break compatibility) in all active branches and then also change > the APIs in trunk (an incompatible change). > > I just came across an internal issue related to the NM > whitelist/blacklist. I would be happy to go refactor the code and look for > instances of these and replace them with allowlist/blocklist. Doing a quick > "git grep" of trunk, I see 270 instances of "whitelist" and 1318 instances > of "blacklist". > > If there are no objections, I'll create a JIRA to clean this specific > stuff up. It would be wonderful if others could pick up a different portion > (e.g. master/slave) so that we can spread the work out. > > Eric > > On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 6:27 PM Carlo Aldo Curino <carlo.cur...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> Hello Folks, >> >> I hope you are all doing well... >> >> *The problem* >> The recent protests made me realize that we are not just a bystanders of >> the systematic racism that affect our society, but we are active >> participants of it. Being "non-racist" is not enough, I strongly feel we >> should be actively "anti-racist" in our day to day lives, and continuously >> check our biases. I assume most of you will agree with the general >> sentiment, but based on your exposure to the recent events and US >> culture/history might have more or less strong feelings about your role in >> the problem and potential solution. >> >> *What can we do about it?* I think a simple action we can take is to work >> on our code/comments/documentation/websites and remove racist terminology. >> Here is a IETF draft to fix up some of the most egregious examples >> (master/slave, whitelist/backlist) with proposed alternatives. >> >> https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-00.html#rfc.section.1.1.1 >> Also as we go about this effort, we should also consider other >> "non-inclusive" terminology issues around gender (e.g., binary gendered >> examples, "Alice" doing the wrong security thing systematically), and >> ableism (e.g., referring to misbehaving hardware as "lame" or "limping", >> etc.). >> The easiest action item is to avoid this going forward (ideally adding it >> to the checkstyles if possible), a more costly one is to start going back >> and refactor away existing instances. >> >> I know this requires a bunch of work as refactorings might break dev >> branches and non-committed patches, possibly scripts, etc. but I think >> this >> is something important and relatively simple we can do. The effect goes >> well beyond some text in github, it signals what we believe in, and forces >> hundreds of users and contributors to notice and think about it. Our >> force-multiplier is huge and it matches our responsibility. >> >> What do you folks think? >> >> Thanks, >> Carlo >> >
