On 10 Jul 2020, at 3:06, Rupert Gallagher wrote:
Whatever you do under the hood, make sure it does not affect external
behaviour.
On your motivation, bear in mind that *lists here contain computer
addresses, not people,
Which is an argument FOR changing our terminology.
so the reference you are trying to fix is mistaken, and changes will
be painstaking for no reason at all.
That misses the actual rationale for the change.
There's a semantic collision in English where "Black" and "White" are
used both to classify people and to denote moral and/or desirability
dichotomies. That semantic collision can be removed from our code, while
improving the clarity of our naming.
The SpamAssassin Project has a particular self-interest in attracting
contributors from a diversity of cultures, because we are always at risk
of mislabelling a pattern of letters or words as 'spammy' when in fact
it is entirely normal in a cultural context other than those of the
existing contributors to the project. Continuing to use 'black' and
'white' as indicators of value in code and configuration directives
leaves in place a minor nuisance for some potential contributors and
users who are understandably tired of being on the bad side of this
semantic collision, where the most common word for their ethnic identity
is constantly being used as a label for things which are bad,
undesirable, malfeasant, etc. The naming collision is a problem and
because the inanimate entities for which we use black and white do not
in fact have any color we can both eliminate the collision AND improve
the quality of the names we use.
And the terms master and slave have nothing to do with white and
black, and again they refer to machine processes, not people.
This is actually almost irrelevant for SA. The main use of the
master/slave metaphor is in the automation backend for rule QA (e.g.
build/jenkins/run_build) where it merits changing simply because it is
no longer consistent with the terminology used by Jenkins. In spamd,
parent/child is already the terminology and fits the actual code better.
--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not For Hire (currently)
