During the last weeks various social movements have been carried out on the current demonstrations by racism worldwide and just like we shared in a previous articleAlso, different software projects have joined this movement either expressing their support or also announcing internal changes within the use of their terminology.
Such is the case as we mentioned in the previous article on the position of the CEO of GitHub in which by means of a tweet I express my support and the intention of eliminating the terms "master and slave".
In that same article we mentioned other projects that had also joined the movement to eliminate these words within their projects, as well as others that could refer to "racism" such as "white list", "black list", etc. If you want to know more about the entry we share, you can consult it in the following link.
And it is that making mention of this, a few days ago the developers of the LLVM project expressed their wish to follow the example of other projects and stop using the word "teacher" to identify the main repository.
This announced change is presented as a demonstration that the LLVM community it is inclusive and sensitive to issues that may cause discomfort to certain categories of participants.
Instead of "master", it is proposed to choose a neutral replacementFor example, "dev", "trunk", "main" or "default".
Note that before switching from SVN to Git, the main branch was named "trunk" and this name is still familiar to developers. At the same time, it is proposed to consider replacing the references to the terms whitelist / blacklist with allowlist / denylist.
At the same time, renaming the main branch will require changes to the build scripts, the configuration of the continuous integration system and the related scripts, but it is noted that these changes will be insignificant compared to the recent migration from SVN to Git.
In the announcement by the developers, the following can be read:
I am well aware that "master" has other meanings than the meaning master / slave, and I personally never made this association in the past. However, I can also acknowledge that I have privileges here, and that not everyone is in the same position.
As we intend to be an inclusive community, I propose that we change the name of our development branch and instead adopt a more neutral terminology for the LLVM monorepo. Possible names are "dev", "trunk", "main", "default", ...
We need to plan a transition as all bots will need to upgrade to crawl this new branch, but these are minor technical details, nothing compared to the SVN-> Git migration we went through.
As I am talking about this topic, we should also consider the widespread use of the black / white list in the project.
Most of the participants in the discussion, with more than 60 posts, they spoke in favor of the name change. The proposal was also approved by Chris Lattner, the founder and chief architect of LLVM, but he recommended not to rush, but to wait and see what GitHub's initiative is to end up using the default name 'master' for main branches (to use when changing the name) same terminology as on GitHub).
It is not sarcasm, taking the situation to an absurdity, which some took seriously. Roman Lebedev (942 commitments in LLVM) mentioned that if we talk about inclusion, then you should think about the convenience of using other words.
In addition, it should also be mentioned that due to this movement by many projects in the «Easylist» ad block list, the files with the word «whitelist» (white list) were renamed and replaced by «allowlist», but They forgot to fix the scripts and some users began to experience problems with their blocking, so more in-depth changes are required.
If you want to know more about the statement issued, you can check the details In the following link.
The level of stupidity to which some things are carried has no limits.
Ohhh already on GitHub they have put an end to racism and this is how they are going to change the world. Slave and master are words that look good on technology, not people. Let's stop the nonsense that we seem to be getting dumber every time.
If we enter the game of "politically correct", in a short time we will not be people…. they want us stupid, single-minded machines and, as such, totally manageable.