On 20200710 11:31:57, Bill Cole wrote:
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.
I am still trying to figure out the rationale for forcing everybody out there
with established lists of "whitelist_from_rcvd" and "blacklist_from_rcvd" to go
out there and edit EVERYBODY's user_prefs or explain to users they must do this
themselves. *I* can do this easily enough and call them foolist_from_rcvd and
barlist_from_rcvd if needed. I am thinking if people with setups in small
business offices that have to invade privacy or explain how so that user_prefs
can be changed. And how about all the ancillary scripts that train spam that
also have to be changed?
This is something that is not broken, currently works, that some dolt is trying
to fix. It's better you call that person a dolt than try to change the world and
break everything. Making this change is dumb. It is counter-productive. It is
even destructive. Just Say No.
{^_^}
