LLVM Developers Plotting Path Forward For Moving To A New Git Branch Name

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LLVM Developers Plotting Path Forward For Moving To A New Git Branch Name

LLVM is the latest open-source project working to shift their Git development terminology away from the "master" branch naming and to something more inclusive. Nearly everyone who voiced their opinion so far were in favor of this change, but there still are open matters such as what to call their new main development branch, the involved technical costs, and how quickly such a transition should happen...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LLVM-Default-Branch-Discussion

[kescherPh]

Ah yes, the branch name change that does not actually change anything significant.
This kind of change contributes nothing to the fight against inequality. All it is is virtue signalling, while giving back nothing of value to anyone. Donations (to the proper organisations actually fighting issues such as systemic racism, inequality between genders, discrimination against people in LGBTQ+, ...) would do much more good.

[kescherPh]

The matter was also raised of replacing LLVM's whitelist/blacklist terminology with allowlist/denylist, which looks like it will happen soon in the LLVM codebase. It was also raised by one developer of potentially avoiding the words "work" and "job" since in Russian and other slavic languages it can be translated in part to "slave."

I'd like to know how whitelist and blacklist are racist. They can only be racist if the person associating these terms with skin colors is racist. These terms have never been about skin color. They have always been about "if there's light it's good" and "if there's no light it's bad".

[tildearrow]

I'd like to know how whitelist and blacklist are racist. They can only be racist if the person associating these terms with skin colors is racist. These terms have never been about skin color. They have always been about "if there's light it's good" and "if there's no light it's bad".

Exactly. I don't know what they're thinking.

Like to me "allowlist/denylist" doesn't make any sense at all... I mean come on, whitelist and blacklist was fine, so what's the problem?!
Seriously, this is going too far...

[tildearrow]

Next up: go back to SVN or Mercurial because "git" is an insult.

[caligula]

Ah yes, the branch name change that does not actually change anything significant.

Well, it provides a full time job for dozens of mediocre coders sending pull requests with textual rewrites and suggestions to pick up stronger CoC frameworks along the way.

[RamblingMadMan]

Well, that's the last nail in the coffin for me. From now on I'm gonna be using GCCJIT, libFirm or other alternatives where I might have used LLVM.

[arcivanov]

The word "работа" - work and the word "раб" - slave, have the same stem. Your "work history" is "рабочая книжка". Furthermore, the very words "Slav" and "slave" are related, i.e. English "slave" is derived from "Slav" by ways of Greek and Latin. Are we renaming the people and languages now too?

Someone is trolling the LLVM list.

[curfew]

I'd like to know how whitelist and blacklist are racist. They can only be racist if the person associating these terms with skin colors is racist. These terms have never been about skin color. They have always been about "if there's light it's good" and "if there's no light it's bad".

Yes, the history of the terms is in the ancient religions that considered day and light good and night and darkness bad.

Associating blacklist and whitelist with racism is in itself racist on so many levels. The obvious link is mistaking these for skin colors, but the added racism comes in form of denying other skin colors, or "races", from existence, which is similar behavior to "transphobes" who only acknowledge two genders, denying loonies their favourite pronouns.

[eltomito]

Not using the word master isn't gonna help anything. If you want to contribute to a positive change, you have to do something a bit more complicated than that. I see this as a pathetic effort by clueless people to seem relevant where they aren't.