VALLIUM Merged Into Mesa 20.3 As Vulkan Front-End To Gallium3D

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VALLIUM Merged Into Mesa 20.3 As Vulkan Front-End To Gallium3D

Red Hat's David Airlie has been on quite a spree lately with open-source graphics driver improvements from OpenGL 4 for LLVMpipe to now merging "VALLIUM" for a Vulkan software implementation...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-VALLIUM-Merged

[orome]

[STRIKE]Nothing says 'welcoming environment' better than naming a component after a rape drug... [/STRIKE]

It shares a name with medication used as data rape drug

EDIT: Just because some have trouble understanding; It's comment on the poor choice of name, nothing else. Just as using 'master' branch has negative connotations, 'vallium' is a poor choice of name. All it takes is to check associated meaning of a word before picking a name.

EDIT2: reworded to stop needlessly trigering people.

[marlock]

I am in favor of inclusive and welcoming working environments, but I feel compeled to draw a line here...

The dev is working on a tool that bridges Vulkan + gALLIUM3d, hence aptly naming it after a joint lettering which also happens to be a medicine, with well known and well established legitimate uses.

But of course, nothing says 'welcoming environment' like screaming "rape apologist" to a dev that has done nothing of the sort, right? I'm also sure people will feel much more at ease with that kind of toxic baseless accusation flying around all the time in than they would with the chosen name, right?

How about commenting on the technical merits of the project instead?

Like, is it useful in SBCs like old Raspberry Pis for quick Vulkan support where no direct driver support exists?

[pete910]

Nothing says 'welcoming environment' better than naming a component after a rape drug...

Seriously !

I've read some daft comments but that's one of the worst.

Also it's Rohypnol that's associated with date rape.

[orome]

I am in favor of inclusive and welcoming working environments, but I feel compeled to draw a line here...

The dev is working on a tool that bridges Vulkan + gALLIUM3d, hence aptly naming it after a joint lettering which also happens to be a medicine, with well known and well established legitimate uses.

But of course, nothing says 'welcoming environment' like screaming "rape apologist" to a dev that has done nothing of the sort, right? I'm also sure people will feel much more at ease with that kind of toxic baseless accusation flying around all the time in than they would with the chosen name, right?

There was no accusation in my comment, other than poor naming judgement.
YOU started throwing toxic accusations around. but I guess, whatever serves your self-righteous outrage.

[marlock]

I'm sorry if my post feels like a misinterpretation of your tone, but:

1) it's hard to judge tone in text
2) given the easily demonstrable/reproducible phenomenom of fast toxicity escalation in Phoronix forum comments regarding the subject of inclusive wording/naming, it's easy to imagine why I read it like I did
3) I don't regret criticizing the line of thought, regardless of your tone, because Vallium is not automatically regarded as a "rape drug" and the only kind of argumentation this remark can attract to the forum is just as toxic as I portraid... "rape apology" is the obvious subtext to interpreting the medicine as a rape drug and you are 100% responsible for bringing in that context, not me, so it still remains an unhappy choice of conversational focus, setting the stage to yet another 100-comment rage which has nothing to do with the dev's work

ps: people who are native english speakers may not realize this, but mostly any word not interpretable as offensive in english will still have some similarly written/sounding word with possible offensive connotations in some other language... especially if you count words which have multiple connotations, and even more so if you count words with a perfectly fine most common use but with a secondary use that is somehow offensive

should we ban "eggplant" because the corresponding emoji started being used for male organs... should we rename Clam Antivirus (despite the obvious hardened shell protection metaphor) because it is also used to refer to female organs? etc, etc, etc...

the offense here is purely constructed by a malicious reading of the name after taken out of context, not by common use, not by any extra hint given by the dev...

...and that is going way overboard in what inclusive namespaces should (and is proposing) to do, because what is being attempted now is more precise and more specific and more well aimed, eg. removing stuff with well-known racist backstory like "whitelist" and "blacklist" where their meaning was *defined* by racists and only later used in non-racist contexts, so your remark is also counterproductive as it murkies this fundamental difference (not on purpose, but it does help blur it out)

[lyamc]

[STRIKE]Nothing says 'welcoming environment' better than naming a component after a rape drug... [/STRIKE]

It shares a name with medication used as data rape drug

Do you go onto forums about Canadian Pacific and tell people that the acronym CP stands for something else? What the heck are you doing?

Also, Valium the brand name for a drug which is a benzodiazepine.

Diazepam, first marketed as Valium, is a medicine of the benzodiazepine

I think if I ever work in some Resident Evil style biolab, I'll make sure I name my virus, "Orome".

[illwieckz]

eg. removing stuff with well-known racist backstory like "whitelist" and "blacklist" where their meaning was *defined* by racists and only later used in non-racist contexts

Do you have serious proof of that? I don't know for “blacklist” but I know for “blackball”: monks have a very old tradition to vote for the new father abbot with colored balls. For a monk proposed to become the father abbot, other monks would put balls in a container, white ball would count as a vote for, black ball would count as a vote against. Because in some case once black ball may be enough to say no whatever the amount of white balls (effectively a veto), comes the verb “to blackball someone” (in French: “blackbouler”). I guess that usage had spread among other brotherhoods.

I would be very surprised if such usage has not extended to other words (like blacklist). For blackballs there is nothing related to skin colors, I would be surprised if there would never be any blacklist wording before any racist started to use it, think about it: paper is white, ink is black, a check list is a black list. To me the big problem is the lack of knowledge. For medieval monks (those who were likely to use black balls), the word slavery meant white people enslaved by arab armies from north african arab colonies. There was words before US black slavery was a thing, there was history before USA was a thing, there was english language before USA was a thing. The fact some people want to erase history because it would tell something bad just make sure future people do things without knowledge and without having learned the lessons from the past.

In 19th ”Littré” french dictionary, a “list” (“liste” in french) is a white band located at the front of the horse's head, occupying the forehead and muzzle, then this dictionary says that by derivation of the primitive sense of small white band on horse's head, the name also design a list of people or things. In norvegian, a ”list” is a long narrow subject that forms an edge, especially as a transition between different elements, so we get another compatible meaning for the white band on the horse's head, without any racist, even human meaning. So, the “list” as a “list of thing” is related to a roll of paper used to list thing, like a white band… like the thing on the horse's head…

The european white list on the horse head… The european black ball to say no. Are you sure all of this was defined by US racists? Of course, once history is rewritten, no one would be able to check for truth and only option would be to believe deletionist (negationist?) propaganda.

[smitty3268]

[STRIKE]It shares a name with medication used as data rape drug.

I have never heard Valium associated with date rape, only Rohypnol or GHB. So I don't think that's a common connotation at all.

[marlock]

actually I don't, and maybe you're right that this was not the full story of "black" and "white" for lists and otherwise... that's already a much more informed discussion than the one about vallium, thank you! (citation needed, if we are to go that way, but really much better)

yet it's undeniable that the "white-positive and "black-negative" pair has been extensively used in racist contexts and this historically charged connotation is still strong enough to entertain avoiding it where possible

edit: judging by the wikipedia article "blacklist" has been guilty of participating in not one but several horrible historical contexts... so yeah, there's that too... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting

plus, there is a small pro in the particular change since the most common alternatives "allowlist" and "denylist" convey explicit meaning about how the thing will work

and finally, all of the posts in this thread now are living proof of how much the original post has done to turn the conversation completely off-topic to something completely fruitless in regard to the post itself

can we start talking about VALLIUM now?