Hi,
Le 18/06/2020 à 21:56, Neal Richardson a écrit :
> Hi all,
> As you're likely aware, there's growing momentum in the developer community
> to drop terminology that some find offensive.
Yes. Is it reasonable? Does it achieve anything? Is there any sense
in trying to "drop terminology that some find offensive"?
>
As a project that takes pride
> in being welcoming and inclusive, I think this is something we should get
> in front of--particularly as we're approaching a 1.0 release.
I don't think we would get "in front of". We would just be following
the "growing momentum". In other words, we would do something because
it's popular.
(I'll note that the urge to follow the "growing momentum" is how the
developer community standardised on irritating tools like Git)
In the long term, and in the face of the problems that it claims to
address, this seems futile to me. But it makes some people feel good
about doing something, and it's (small) PR for the project...
Now to the specifics:
> Specifically, I am proposing to:
>
> 1. rename the "master" branch to something else ("main" seems to be
> popular; other version control systems use other words too).
I used Mercurial before Git, and Mercurial uses "default". I used SVN
before Mercurial, and SVN uses "trunk". I don't remember if CVS is
sophisticated enough to have any name for this concept :-)
The problem, though, is that "master" is the overwhelming convention in
Git land. Well-known conventions make a better user experience (you
clone a git repo, you get the "master" branch and you know it: done).
If we choose a non-"master" name, we add an additional hoop to jump
through for users to approach Arrow. It's a small thing, but usability
is often about such small things.
> 2. replace "whitelist"/"blacklist" in our code with something like
> "allowlist"/"blocklist", or otherwise renaming.
"allow"/"deny" sounds terser, and also seems more symmetric to me.
Also, be careful: "block" is very close, unsafely close, to "black"...
Regards
Antoine.
