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

[curfew]

Is there any references to 'slave' in git terminology? (I honestly don't know). If there is, then I think it reasonable to consider 'master' a problematic (even if not necessarily racist) term.

And I think it is not reasonable. People who fail to understand that words can have multiple meanings are essentially illiterate. This kind of people should never be allowed to make decisions for others. ut of course in this case, it was claimed, there is a majority support for the change, so there is no need to argue about the terminology any further, really, as it is seems a done deal.

The whole Master-Slave=Racism thing is rather ex-colonial-centric, too, but since we are predominately talking about it in the context of ex-colonial languages like English, that doesn't necessarily invalidate the pro-change argument.

I feel sincere pity towards people who think this kind of nonsensical jargon, verbal diarrhea, is somehow valid argumentation.

OTOH, irrespective of etymology, I like allow/deny-list over black/white-list simply on the grounds of clar[ity of meaning sans cultural context.

How is choosing who to allow or deny basic rights from going to be any more neutral regardless of the terminology? It is still a racist concept, bigotry. The concept of privileged users should be banned altogether. Arguing about which words to use seems retarded to me.

Besides the actual cultural context is different from what you assume. Hint: not in any way related to what color people are.

[Duff~]

The floor is racism.

[Teggs]

'Main' is already in use, it's unambiguous, and it's fine. Still no change should be made, because Master in this case has nothing to do with slavery or racism. The people pushing this are either extremely ignorant about the subject they are attempting to teach, or they know very well there is no relation and are evil minded. Projects should push back against this attempt to control the very words coming out of people's mouths, when there is no reason. There is no good ending for that.

Allowlist is cumbersome, but descriptive, I guess. Denylist is terrible. It sounds like 'Denialist', which describes a person in denial about something, or who has a personality that tends to reject new thoughts in general.

I was just thinking recently that social justice warriors must be annoyed there is no attention on them for months due to various issues of disease and actual justice around the world. Here we see them trying again to coopt a real issue for false purposes. It's disgusting to push their dishonest agenda under the mantle of a real problem, but apparently they care more about being noticed and feeling 'powerful' than the damage they do to their supposed goal of combating racism.

This proposal is garbage and should have been shunned as such, not front page news. The LLVM project should treat themselves better than this.

[zxy_thf]

The new naming scheme is DOUBLE PLUS GOOD!

[computerquip]

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".

The concept of contextual meaning is dead.

[microcode]

Quarantine yourselves from these people who savage language itself, and from those too spineless to question it.

[microcode]

I slowly begin being racist, just because of this. If there be only one race (my race), no one do stupid moves like this, like changing terminology which dont have racial podtext.

Well, things don't work out that way. In societies where there are not more obvious broad racial categories, racism gets finer and finer. Look close enough and I'm sure you'd reinvent races at any scale.

The only way around this is to reject nonsense like this piecemeal, and dismantle and preempt Critical Race Theory wherever it may creep into your daily life.

Don't let them win.

[gabber]

And so the cancer grows. Pointless changes eating up valuable dev / maintainer time. Breaking a bunch of scripts in the process.

No life is saved with this, but some useless people fell better because of this.

Does someone have a blacklist of those participating in this drummed up outrage?
- node.js
- Microsoft (not hard to boycott here I guess..)
- LLVM

PS:
To those who think only BLM: If you really want to save black lives, don't look at the police. 2'500/year die from non white non cops. And if you want to stop police violence, don't limit your scope to blacks.

[ssokolow]

OK, this is getting silly. I can see replacing master/slave terminology, but this use is "master" as in "master copy". I've never heard of a "slave copy".

If this continues, we're going to see people protesting the idea of "mastering a skill" and "master's degrees".

Besides, I doubt they'll be happy with *any* change to "master" for long, because the core concept is authoritative-ness and, with so many people raging against authority now, idiots gonna idiot.

What we really need is CoCs that ban this sort of "not sure if trolling or just that stupid" misinterpretation of language.

(And seeing that pluralized acronym makes me wonder how long it'll be before our idiocracy produces someone who will rage against using the acronym for Code of Conduct because it's obscene when pronounced.)

[ssokolow]

On the contrary, whitelist/blacklist terms seem to have everything to do with racism: http://jmla.pitt.edu/ojs/jmla/article/view/490
Good initiative from LLVM community

The JMLA may be peer-reviewed according to Wikipedia, but I find it telling that this is the first academic paper I've ever seen that begins with a quote.

The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams. [1]Maya Angelou

(To be fair, though, I usually read technical and science papers. Maybe manipulating the reader with charged quotes is par for the course in the soft sciences.)