About the use of the terms master/slave and blacklist, proposal to replace.

4 years ago by Kalle Sommer Nielsen — view source

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Hi

Den man. 15. jun. 2020 kl. 18.43 skrev Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com:

Hi internals,

I think the time has come for the PHP internals to discuss the use of master/slave and blacklist terminologies.
As everyone can see, we are going through times of change in the world, see #blackLivesMatter for example.
Therefore, I propose that we discuss the non-use of terms master/slave, because the use of this can allude to the slavery and negative feelings about black people.

We are an open source project and should be politically neutral,
changing this not only causes a huge BC break, but puts us in a
position where we are no longer politically neutral. You should be
able to join and be a part of the PHP project without feeling
obligated to follow certain global politics like trying to not use
blacklist, master, slave or whatever flavour of the day word here that
may be offensive to someone.

The moment we change blacklist to blocklist, we are essentially
agreeing to the fact that we should censor words because they contain
a color in its name, something that is totally unrelated to any human
race. Are we also gonna change the internal values of the Garbage
Collector for PHP to not use different color markings or what about
the IMG_BLACKMAN filter, are we gonna rename that even though it is
named so after the Blackman-Turkey transformation? Of course we should
not. We cannot go around and censor words that have no correlation to
the current political events occurring world wide. This here is just
an example of changing things for the sake of changing.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Daniel Rodrigues Lima — view source

unread

Hi Kalle,

I understand your position.

But i believe that changing retrograde terminologies that refer to bad feelings,
doesn't put us anywhere politically.

It's not about sides, it's about people, and our community is made up of people.

--
Cheers,

Daniel Rodrigues

geekcom@php.net
https://twitter.com/geekcom2

De: Kalle Sommer Nielsen kalle@php.net
Enviado: segunda-feira, 15 de junho de 2020 12:58
Para: Daniel Rodrigues Lima danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com
Cc: PHP Internals internals@lists.php.net
Assunto: Re: [PHP-DEV] About the use of the terms master/slave and blacklist, proposal to replace.

Hi

Den man. 15. jun. 2020 kl. 18.43 skrev Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com:

Hi internals,

I think the time has come for the PHP internals to discuss the use of master/slave and blacklist terminologies.
As everyone can see, we are going through times of change in the world, see #blackLivesMatter for example.
Therefore, I propose that we discuss the non-use of terms master/slave, because the use of this can allude to the slavery and negative feelings about black people.

We are an open source project and should be politically neutral,
changing this not only causes a huge BC break, but puts us in a
position where we are no longer politically neutral. You should be
able to join and be a part of the PHP project without feeling
obligated to follow certain global politics like trying to not use
blacklist, master, slave or whatever flavour of the day word here that
may be offensive to someone.

The moment we change blacklist to blocklist, we are essentially
agreeing to the fact that we should censor words because they contain
a color in its name, something that is totally unrelated to any human
race. Are we also gonna change the internal values of the Garbage
Collector for PHP to not use different color markings or what about
the IMG_BLACKMAN filter, are we gonna rename that even though it is
named so after the Blackman-Turkey transformation? Of course we should
not. We cannot go around and censor words that have no correlation to
the current political events occurring world wide. This here is just
an example of changing things for the sake of changing.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Max Semenik — view source

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пн, 15 июн. 2020 г., 19:15 Daniel Rodrigues Lima <
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com>:

But i believe that changing retrograde terminologies that refer to bad
feelings,
doesn't put us anywhere politically.

It's not about sides, it's about people, and our community is made up of
people.

The word "master" has 18 meanings in English, according to
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/master - do you propose to outlaw those 17
of them that have nothing to do with slavery, too? What about master's
degree, for example?

4 years ago by Reinis Rozitis — view source

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The word "master" has 18 meanings in English, according to
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/master - do you propose to outlaw those
17 of them that have nothing to do with slavery, too? What about master's
degree, for example?

I wonder what will astronomers do with 'black hole' ..

p.s. or physicists with 'white noise'. Also what happens when someone decides 'whitespace' to be racist .. Crazy times.

rr

4 years ago by Michael Cordover — view source

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The word "master" has 18 meanings in English, according to
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/master - do you propose to outlaw those
17 of them that have nothing to do with slavery, too? What about master's
degree, for example?

I wonder what will astronomers do with 'black hole' ..

p.s. or physicists with 'white noise'. Also what happens when someone
decides 'whitespace' to be racist .. Crazy times.

The black in black hole and the white in whitespace are descriptions of the actual colors of these things. There's no value judgement there. Blacklist, on the other hand, is explicitly making a judgement that things on that list are bad. The association of "black" with "bad" (and "white" with "good" in whitelist) is the problem, not merely the use of a color at all.

Similarly, while there are plenty of meanings of master, the use of master as a branch name comes from BitKeeper0, where it was specifically in the context of a master and a slave. This is specifically an analogy rooted in violent practices. While it may not be jarring for you to hear it, it can be deeply upsetting to people even to hear mention of slavery.

It's totally ok for a project to have and preserve established practices. But you can't get away from these facts: maintaining this terminology excludes people. It hurts people. The question is does PHP want to be a project that defends that, or do we want to try as hard as possible not to hurt folks. I know which side I'm on.

mjec

4 years ago by Jakob Givoni — view source

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The black in black hole and the white in whitespace are descriptions of the actual colors of these things.
There's no value judgement there.
Blacklist, on the other hand, is explicitly making a judgement that things on that list are bad.
The association of "black" with "bad" (and "white" with "good" in whitelist) is the problem, not merely the use of a color at all.

Yes, someone who gets it.

I am using the term "blacklist" often in the project I work on, and it
never occurred to me before that it could be considered offensive.
But I learned something new in this thread and I am thankful for that!

Best,
Jakob

4 years ago by David Rodrigues — view source

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I don't think that terminology of this type affects people. Or else, they
shouldn't. Comparing "blacklist" with a black person, implying something
pejorative, seems more sick to those who think like that than we actually
understand with the meaning of the word in our midst. I understand that
this can be done in a different way from now on for new codes or updates,
as long as it does not impact immediate understanding and does not create
problems for existing things (like Github wanting to exchange "master" for
"main", which for me will cause much more confusion than actually solving
something for the world).

For me, such changes are just to say "we care" in a very forced and not at
all humble way. They are like youtubers that donate to homeless people just
to get likes, and basically they are not like that at all in everyday life
(of course, considering that there are really exceptions).

Anyway, I believe that we must keep the current terminology as long as it
has specific meaning for us and, if it is to change, to change little by
little, and not in a radical or forced way.

Atenciosamente,
David Rodrigues

Em seg., 15 de jun. de 2020 às 13:15, Daniel Rodrigues Lima <
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com> escreveu:

Hi Kalle,

I understand your position.

But i believe that changing retrograde terminologies that refer to bad
feelings,
doesn't put us anywhere politically.

It's not about sides, it's about people, and our community is made up of
people.

--
Cheers,

Daniel Rodrigues

geekcom@php.net
https://twitter.com/geekcom2

De: Kalle Sommer Nielsen kalle@php.net
Enviado: segunda-feira, 15 de junho de 2020 12:58
Para: Daniel Rodrigues Lima danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com
Cc: PHP Internals internals@lists.php.net
Assunto: Re: [PHP-DEV] About the use of the terms master/slave and
blacklist, proposal to replace.

Hi

Den man. 15. jun. 2020 kl. 18.43 skrev Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com:

Hi internals,

I think the time has come for the PHP internals to discuss the use of
master/slave and blacklist terminologies.
As everyone can see, we are going through times of change in the world,
see #blackLivesMatter for example.
Therefore, I propose that we discuss the non-use of terms master/slave,
because the use of this can allude to the slavery and negative feelings
about black people.

We are an open source project and should be politically neutral,
changing this not only causes a huge BC break, but puts us in a
position where we are no longer politically neutral. You should be
able to join and be a part of the PHP project without feeling
obligated to follow certain global politics like trying to not use
blacklist, master, slave or whatever flavour of the day word here that
may be offensive to someone.

The moment we change blacklist to blocklist, we are essentially
agreeing to the fact that we should censor words because they contain
a color in its name, something that is totally unrelated to any human
race. Are we also gonna change the internal values of the Garbage
Collector for PHP to not use different color markings or what about
the IMG_BLACKMAN filter, are we gonna rename that even though it is
named so after the Blackman-Turkey transformation? Of course we should
not. We cannot go around and censor words that have no correlation to
the current political events occurring world wide. This here is just
an example of changing things for the sake of changing.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Kalle Sommer Nielsen — view source

unread

Den man. 15. jun. 2020 kl. 19.15 skrev Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com:

Hi Kalle,

I understand your position.

But i believe that changing retrograde terminologies that refer to bad feelings,
doesn't put us anywhere politically.

It exactly puts us in a political area, because the moment we change
these things we are effectively agreeing that this is a terminology
(while unrelated to races) that should be censored. That is where the
political stance begins. You are trying to censor something because
you think it might be offensive to some, that is the first problem
here. Any person raised with basic understanding of social etiquette
and norms understand that these are not words that are offensive
words, unlike so many other words. Claiming a word may be offensive to
some without understanding the actual meaning of the word is poor
judgement.

It's not about sides, it's about people, and our community is made up of people.

It puts us at different sides, because now you are playing on the
feeling that it refers to bad feelings, and because it is a political
agenda to censor, then it becomes about sides as there is never an
agreement in a political spectrum.

One thing your reply does not do either is to justify the BC break
that any of these have on a grand scale. It might be fine to change
your policy for your local medium sized open source project, but when
you are dealing with something on the scale of PHP, you have to
justify these changes and I still am not convinced that we should
change these for the sake of changing. I get that the thread is to
start a dialog, but I do not see any concrete plan here to justify
these changes.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Stanislav Malyshev — view source

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Hi!

The moment we change blacklist to blocklist, we are essentially
agreeing to the fact that we should censor words because they contain
a color in its name, something that is totally unrelated to any human
race. Are we also gonna change the internal values of the Garbage
Collector for PHP to not use different color markings or what about
the IMG_BLACKMAN filter, are we gonna rename that even though it is
named so after the Blackman-Turkey transformation? Of course we should
not. We cannot go around and censor words that have no correlation to
the current political events occurring world wide. This here is just
an example of changing things for the sake of changing.

Very well said. Thank you.

Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com

4 years ago by Nikita Popov — view source

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On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 5:43 PM Daniel Rodrigues Lima <
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hi internals,

I think the time has come for the PHP internals to discuss the use of
master/slave and blacklist terminologies.
As everyone can see, we are going through times of change in the world,
see #blackLivesMatter for example.
Therefore, I propose that we discuss the non-use of terms master/slave,
because the use of this can allude to the slavery and negative feelings
about black people.

If you would like to rename user-visible symbols, please create an RFC,
which details what exactly will be renamed, analyzes what the backward
compatibility impact will be and provides a sensible migration path and
timeline.

If I may be honest, I find it somewhat disrespectful that you started this
thread without investing any effort from your side. A simple "grep
backlist" and "grep master" on the PHP codebase would have gone a long way
towards identifying what can/should be changed.

Regards,
Nikita

4 years ago by Daniel Rodrigues Lima — view source

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Hi Nikita,

Thanks for suggestions, I didn't mean to be disrespectful.
Create an RFC is exactly the next step, but first I needed to understand if there was support for that.

How is it in the process of creating an RFC...

"1. Email internals@lists.php.net to measure reaction to your intended proposal. "

--
Cheers,

Daniel Rodrigues

geekcom@php.net mailto:geekcom@php.net
https://twitter.com/geekcom2

De: Nikita Popov nikita.ppv@gmail.com
Enviado: segunda-feira, 15 de junho de 2020 13:51
Para: Daniel Rodrigues Lima danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com
Cc: PHP Internals internals@lists.php.net
Assunto: Re: [PHP-DEV] About the use of the terms master/slave and blacklist, proposal to replace.

Hi internals,

I think the time has come for the PHP internals to discuss the use of master/slave and blacklist terminologies.
As everyone can see, we are going through times of change in the world, see #blackLivesMatter for example.
Therefore, I propose that we discuss the non-use of terms master/slave, because the use of this can allude to the slavery and negative feelings about black people.

If you would like to rename user-visible symbols, please create an RFC, which details what exactly will be renamed, analyzes what the backward compatibility impact will be and provides a sensible migration path and timeline.

If I may be honest, I find it somewhat disrespectful that you started this thread without investing any effort from your side. A simple "grep backlist" and "grep master" on the PHP codebase would have gone a long way towards identifying what can/should be changed.

Regards,
Nikita

4 years ago by Ben Ramsey — view source

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Hi Nikita,

Thanks for suggestions, I didn't mean to be disrespectful.
Create an RFC is exactly the next step, but first I needed to understand if there was support for that.

How is it in the process of creating an RFC...

"1. Email internals@lists.php.net to measure reaction to your intended proposal. “

You will be able to measure reaction better if you put together a more detailed plan. It doesn’t have to be a full RFC right now, but if you can point to specific places in the PHP code and specific words (and what you plan to replace them with), it will help everyone here discuss things in more concrete terms, rather than thinking abstractly about it.

I also would like to briefly touch on one other thing:

Kalle Sommer Nielsen wrote:

We are an open source project and should be politically neutral

Open source itself is not politically neutral. To state that it is is disingenuous. You might think that your involvement in open source is politically neutral, but it most certainly is not. You are participating because of certain political views you hold. :-)

Cheers,
Ben

4 years ago by Stephen Reay — view source

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Hi internals,

I think the time has come for the PHP internals to discuss the use of master/slave and blacklist terminologies.
As everyone can see, we are going through times of change in the world, see #blackLivesMatter for example.
Therefore, I propose that we discuss the non-use of terms master/slave, because the use of this can allude to the slavery and negative feelings about black people.

Some projects that changed the terminology:

https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/commit/8e9c76d33dab4095c9066072076f368193e4166d

https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/236857/

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-2248

https://bugs.python.org/issue34605

Greets,

Daniel Rodrigues.

geekcom@php.net mailto:geekcom@php.net
https://twitter.com/geekcom2
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielrodrigueslima/

Hi Daniel,

I’m sympathetic to your goals. I’ve had a client ask me in the last hour, while discussing a Redis issue “can we replace those terms ‘slave’ and ‘master’ with “primary” and “replica”.

In technology circles, the terms master and slave are almost always referred to in terms of replicated data stores, and the ‘normal’ replacements are “primary” and “replica”. The terms “whitelist” and “blacklist” generally refer to allowing or disallowing things explicitly.

I’m not going to say it’s not practical to do this or that it’s a BC break, because without some context of what you believe needs to change in PHP itself, this whole conversation seems very abstract.

Can you identify actual references to the terms “master”, “slave”, “blacklist”, “whitelist” somewhere in php that you feel should be changed?

Cheers

Stephen

4 years ago by Stanislav Malyshev — view source

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Hi!

I think the time has come for the PHP internals to discuss the use of master/slave and blacklist terminologies.
As everyone can see, we are going through times of change in the world, see #blackLivesMatter for example.

While your quest for more just and fair world is noble and laudable, I
think your energies are misplaced in this case. Terms like "blacklist"
are established industry terms (and are used also outside the industry -
there's a TV show which is called literally "The Blacklist") and have
absolutely nothing to do with race or any other human traits. Objecting
to "blacklist" makes as much sense as objecting to terms such as
"whitespace", "blackout", "white paper", "red-black tree", "rainbow
tables", or declaring the keyword "final" to be anti-Semitic because
there was "final solution". I think there is many other ways to more
productively spend your time than inventing reasons why innocent words
suddenly have nefarious meanings. However, you are, as literally anybody
is, with no regard to any political labels, free to submit a pull
request against PHP source and we will take a look at it then.

--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com

4 years ago by Lester Caine — view source

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While your quest for more just and fair world is noble and laudable, I
think your energies are misplaced in this case. Terms like "blacklist"
are established industry terms (and are used also outside the industry -

It is now highly likely that M$ will force changes to these in github
which is probably part of what has prompted the thread. Once 'new
established industry terms' have been dictated, then it's simply a
matter of does the PHP process where it is mirrored on github follows
the new standard?

https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/15/github_replaces_master_with_main/
if people are not following the press coverage.

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL

Contact - https://lsces.uk/wiki/Contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - https://lsces.uk
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - https://medw.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - https://rainbowdigitalmedia.uk

4 years ago by Stanislav Malyshev — view source

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Hi!

It is now highly likely that M$ will force changes to these in github
which is probably part of what has prompted the thread. Once 'new

If and when this will happen, we'll see the official message from
Microsoft/Github and decide how to act. There's no point in discussing
such hypotheticals now, since right now Microsoft/Github does not
require anything like that from anybody.

--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com

4 years ago by Alain D D Williams — view source

unread

Hi!

I think the time has come for the PHP internals to discuss the use of master/slave and blacklist terminologies.
As everyone can see, we are going through times of change in the world, see #blackLivesMatter for example.

While your quest for more just and fair world is noble and laudable, I
think your energies are misplaced in this case. Terms like "blacklist"
are established industry terms (and are used also outside the industry -
there's a TV show which is called literally "The Blacklist") and have
absolutely nothing to do with race or any other human traits. Objecting
to "blacklist" makes as much sense as objecting to terms such as
"whitespace", "blackout", "white paper", "red-black tree", "rainbow
tables", or declaring the keyword "final" to be anti-Semitic because
there was "final solution". I think there is many other ways to more
productively spend your time than inventing reasons why innocent words
suddenly have nefarious meanings. However, you are, as literally anybody
is, with no regard to any political labels, free to submit a pull
request against PHP source and we will take a look at it then.

+1

The word/term 'blacklist' seems to go back to 1639:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting

Master/slave is used in many places in engineering where something makes
something else do something. There is nothing that suggests of one human
controlling another. Eg: in car brakes:

https://www.carthrottle.com/post/how-master-cylinders-and-slave-cylinders-work-and-their-importance/

Let us say that we do eliminate terms that some people somehow think refers to
them, where does it stop ? Today it is race (or 'black' skin colour). Tomorrow
it could be:

'black hole' (as in collapsed star)
'brown out' (as in what happens when the electricity is not good enough) - is
that offensive to people with brown skin ?
'yellow pages' (as in NIS) as it might offend some oriental people ?
'fat client' (as in client software that does a lot) as it offends people
with a weight problem ?
'male/female connectors' ?
'zombie processes' ?

There are many, many. Quite hard to write a list because we use the terms every
day with without any intention of offending anyone.

Then other people who identify as groups, eg: sexual, disability, hair colour,
age, jobs, ...

Once you have a list: then come up with lists of words in other (non English) languages.

Once we have done all that then it will need to be revised in a couple of
decades time when different words will, by some people, regarded as offensive.

In other words: you can never win.

It is very easy to take offence when none is meant at all. One needs to look at intent.

--
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256 https://www.phcomp.co.uk/
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: https://www.phcomp.co.uk/Contact.html
#include <std_disclaimer.h

4 years ago by Lynn — view source

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On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 7:46 PM Alain D D Williams addw@phcomp.co.uk
wrote:

It is very easy to take offence when none is meant at all. One needs to
look at intent.

Hi,

I'm going to disagree here. It's not about intent, it's about impact. You
can have the best intentions with the worst results.

When I read the replies here, it makes me sad. The comments come from a
place of white privilege and I'm sad to see that's how people think about
it.

Regards,
Lynn

4 years ago by G. P. B. — view source

unread

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 7:46 PM Alain D D Williams addw@phcomp.co.uk
wrote:

It is very easy to take offence when none is meant at all. One needs to
look at intent.

Hi,

I'm going to disagree here. It's not about intent, it's about impact. You
can have the best intentions with the worst results.

When I read the replies here, it makes me sad. The comments come from a
place of white privilege and I'm sad to see that's how people think about
it.

Regards,
Lynn

What saddens me is that these terms are non issues, and think they do
something for "good" when it's just a pat on the back without doing any
tangible change to the world.

Case in point, from what I've seen mostly going around in the French
community [1] is that the people who are actually concerned think it's
woke and completely nonsensical. And I could argue the white-privelege
here is to discuss these matters and imagine they would improve something.

For blacklist/whitelist the benefit of changing it is that we can use more
descriptive terminology such as deny/block/disallow and their opposite
depending on context, which probably is more accessible to non-native
English speakers. And if one wants to change it this should be the angle.

However, I would argue that if when someone hears the word black the
first thing which comes to their mind is race, then that makes them more
of a racist and not the other people who use this with the well defined
meaning. As such I would argue this is undermining the meaning of the
word and pushing us towards an orwellian [2] state of the world.

Moreover, black does not always mean something is "bad", see martial
arts where a black belt is synonymous with experience and a white belt
means that you are a novice.

So instead of taking offence on behalf of a whole group and proposing
changes which don't affect said group in any meaningful way while
causing BC. Because if we decided to accept doing this, I shall start
being offended about the usage of the word string as in French string
means a thong and I imagine French women to be outraged that we
(predominantly white males) casually talk about splitting or comparing
strings.

Best

George P. Banyard

[1] https://twitter.com/jesuisundev/status/1269260740894117890
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe64p-QzhNE

4 years ago by Larry Garfield — view source

unread

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 7:46 PM Alain D D Williams addw@phcomp.co.uk
wrote:

It is very easy to take offence when none is meant at all. One needs to
look at intent.

Hi,

I'm going to disagree here. It's not about intent, it's about impact. You
can have the best intentions with the worst results.

When I read the replies here, it makes me sad. The comments come from a
place of white privilege and I'm sad to see that's how people think about
it.

Regards,
Lynn

What saddens me is that these terms are non issues, and think they do
something for "good" when it's just a pat on the back without doing any
tangible change to the world.

Case in point, from what I've seen mostly going around in the French
community [1] is that the people who are actually concerned think it's
woke and completely nonsensical. And I could argue the white-privelege
here is to discuss these matters and imagine they would improve something.

For blacklist/whitelist the benefit of changing it is that we can use more
descriptive terminology such as deny/block/disallow and their opposite
depending on context, which probably is more accessible to non-native
English speakers. And if one wants to change it this should be the angle.

However, I would argue that if when someone hears the word black the
first thing which comes to their mind is race, then that makes them more
of a racist and not the other people who use this with the well defined
meaning. As such I would argue this is undermining the meaning of the
word and pushing us towards an orwellian [2] state of the world.

Moreover, black does not always mean something is "bad", see martial
arts where a black belt is synonymous with experience and a white belt
means that you are a novice.

So instead of taking offence on behalf of a whole group and proposing
changes which don't affect said group in any meaningful way while
causing BC. Because if we decided to accept doing this, I shall start
being offended about the usage of the word string as in French string
means a thong and I imagine French women to be outraged that we
(predominantly white males) casually talk about splitting or comparing
strings.

Best

George P. Banyard

[1] https://twitter.com/jesuisundev/status/1269260740894117890
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe64p-QzhNE

I am so going to regret being in this thread, but...

Data point: My boss at work noted earlier that he'd reached out to some black women he knows to get their take; their response to him was that blacklist/whitelist did bother them, but "master branch" did not.

Of course, with GitHub now deciding to change its standards that is going to percolate to the rest of the industry sooner or later, regardless of whether it's a good idea or a stupid waste of time. It's going to happen now.

It should be noted that a person saying "I am offended" does not, in fact, make something automatically offensive, or that you should always assume that their position is right, or justified, or that you should take action as a result. As evidence, I cite that I find "Native American" offensive because it implies one group of people is truly "from" a place rightly, and no one else is no matter how long they've been here; that's despite the fact that every group of people everywhere in history has moved around, a lot, and no one is "native" to anywhere if you go back far enough, and genetic groups and cultural groups migrate independently of each other (much as we like to to pretend otherwise). In fact the term isn't even preferred by the people it refers to[1]. But no one listens to me, because I'm not in a group that's allowed to be offended. There's way more politics around "offense" than anyone is willing to admit. (And that's not a left or right specific issue.)

Also, point of order to Ben: Free Software is political[2]. Open Source was very specifically created to be the de-politicized, amoral version that companies could leverage without having to bother with that ethics stuff. That's literally the history. It's also why I support Free Software. (Note: That attempt is largely unsuccessful because all software is inherently political, but credit where it's due, please.)

Having been through these conversations multiple times before, I would urge everyone to keep in mind the following:

As Nikita said, without an actionable todo item to discuss, there's nothing productive to discuss.
If you are able to find a reason for a change other than "because it's offensive not to," do it, and push that angle. Make the political angle secondary. It makes it more palatable.
For the love of God, do not go into this or similar discussions assuming that anyone who disagrees with you is a bad person. I know it's hard, especially on touchy topics, but that is how communication dies. Wanting to change whitelist/blacklist does not make someone a troublemaker just trying to cause trouble for little value. Opposing that same change does not make someone racist, or uncaring, or "OMG privilege so we don't have to listen to you," or whatever. I've seen that pattern appear way the hell too many times, and it's toxic, and does nothing but poison communities.
Let's all understand that language changes like this are at best broken window policing, and I use that term very deliberately. If you really care about addressing persistent inequality in the world. get your butt out to a Black Lives Matter march, write your legislator, join a reform group, work on hiring practices in your own company, or do something else that requires actual work. That goes for everyone.
Acknowledge that there are very likely a lot of people on this list who are doing the things in point 4 already, but still oppose the language changes. Whether you agree with them or not, that's an acceptable and valid position for them to take. Please respect that.

[1] https://youtu.be/kh88fVP2FWQ
[2] https://peakd.com/programming/@crell/free-software-is-political

--Larry Garfield

4 years ago by Daniel Rodrigues Lima — view source

unread

Hi Larry,

I appreciate your answer, thank you, but i would like to clarify some points:

I found 170 occurrences of the term blacklist - grep -rni "blacklist" php-src/, i'm working to understand the impact of changes;
It’s not about politics, i believe it’s about learning how to be better humans;
I fully agree;
Sometimes it's necessary "broken window policing";
I truly recognize this, and respect above all.

However if the majority disagree with the changes it is not worth pursuing this discussion, and I should not even write an RFC for that.

--
Cheers,

Daniel Rodrigues

https://twitter.com/geekcom2

De: Larry Garfield larry@garfieldtech.com
Enviado: segunda-feira, 15 de junho de 2020 17:21
Para: php internals internals@lists.php.net
Assunto: Re: [PHP-DEV] About the use of the terms master/slave and blacklist, proposal to replace.

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 7:46 PM Alain D D Williams addw@phcomp.co.uk
wrote:

It is very easy to take offence when none is meant at all. One needs to
look at intent.

Hi,

I'm going to disagree here. It's not about intent, it's about impact. You
can have the best intentions with the worst results.

When I read the replies here, it makes me sad. The comments come from a
place of white privilege and I'm sad to see that's how people think about
it.

Regards,
Lynn

What saddens me is that these terms are non issues, and think they do
something for "good" when it's just a pat on the back without doing any
tangible change to the world.

Case in point, from what I've seen mostly going around in the French
community [1] is that the people who are actually concerned think it's
woke and completely nonsensical. And I could argue the white-privelege
here is to discuss these matters and imagine they would improve something.

For blacklist/whitelist the benefit of changing it is that we can use more
descriptive terminology such as deny/block/disallow and their opposite
depending on context, which probably is more accessible to non-native
English speakers. And if one wants to change it this should be the angle.

However, I would argue that if when someone hears the word black the
first thing which comes to their mind is race, then that makes them more
of a racist and not the other people who use this with the well defined
meaning. As such I would argue this is undermining the meaning of the
word and pushing us towards an orwellian [2] state of the world.

Moreover, black does not always mean something is "bad", see martial
arts where a black belt is synonymous with experience and a white belt
means that you are a novice.

So instead of taking offence on behalf of a whole group and proposing
changes which don't affect said group in any meaningful way while
causing BC. Because if we decided to accept doing this, I shall start
being offended about the usage of the word string as in French string
means a thong and I imagine French women to be outraged that we
(predominantly white males) casually talk about splitting or comparing
strings.

Best

George P. Banyard

[1] https://twitter.com/jesuisundev/status/1269260740894117890
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe64p-QzhNE

I am so going to regret being in this thread, but...

Data point: My boss at work noted earlier that he'd reached out to some black women he knows to get their take; their response to him was that blacklist/whitelist did bother them, but "master branch" did not.

Of course, with GitHub now deciding to change its standards that is going to percolate to the rest of the industry sooner or later, regardless of whether it's a good idea or a stupid waste of time. It's going to happen now.

It should be noted that a person saying "I am offended" does not, in fact, make something automatically offensive, or that you should always assume that their position is right, or justified, or that you should take action as a result. As evidence, I cite that I find "Native American" offensive because it implies one group of people is truly "from" a place rightly, and no one else is no matter how long they've been here; that's despite the fact that every group of people everywhere in history has moved around, a lot, and no one is "native" to anywhere if you go back far enough, and genetic groups and cultural groups migrate independently of each other (much as we like to to pretend otherwise). In fact the term isn't even preferred by the people it refers to[1]. But no one listens to me, because I'm not in a group that's allowed to be offended. There's way more politics around "offense" than anyone is willing to admit. (And that's not a left or right specific issue.)

Also, point of order to Ben: Free Software is political[2]. Open Source was very specifically created to be the de-politicized, amoral version that companies could leverage without having to bother with that ethics stuff. That's literally the history. It's also why I support Free Software. (Note: That attempt is largely unsuccessful because all software is inherently political, but credit where it's due, please.)

Having been through these conversations multiple times before, I would urge everyone to keep in mind the following:

As Nikita said, without an actionable todo item to discuss, there's nothing productive to discuss.
If you are able to find a reason for a change other than "because it's offensive not to," do it, and push that angle. Make the political angle secondary. It makes it more palatable.
For the love of God, do not go into this or similar discussions assuming that anyone who disagrees with you is a bad person. I know it's hard, especially on touchy topics, but that is how communication dies. Wanting to change whitelist/blacklist does not make someone a troublemaker just trying to cause trouble for little value. Opposing that same change does not make someone racist, or uncaring, or "OMG privilege so we don't have to listen to you," or whatever. I've seen that pattern appear way the hell too many times, and it's toxic, and does nothing but poison communities.
Let's all understand that language changes like this are at best broken window policing, and I use that term very deliberately. If you really care about addressing persistent inequality in the world. get your butt out to a Black Lives Matter march, write your legislator, join a reform group, work on hiring practices in your own company, or do something else that requires actual work. That goes for everyone.
Acknowledge that there are very likely a lot of people on this list who are doing the things in point 4 already, but still oppose the language changes. Whether you agree with them or not, that's an acceptable and valid position for them to take. Please respect that.

[1] https://youtu.be/kh88fVP2FWQ
[2] https://peakd.com/programming/@crell/free-software-is-political

--Larry Garfield

4 years ago by Larry Garfield — view source

unread

Hi Larry,

I appreciate your answer, thank you, but i would like to clarify some points:

I found 170 occurrences of the term blacklist - grep -rni
"blacklist" php-src/, i'm working to understand the impact of changes;

It’s not about politics, i believe it’s about learning how to be
better humans;

I fully agree;

And yet right here you're doing it. "It's about learning how to be better humans" implies that banishing blacklist/whitelist from your vocabulary, because despite completely separate historical origins the words now happen to coincide with entirely artificial racial terms[1], makes you a "better human" than not doing so. Thus those who oppose the change are inferior humans to those that support it.

That may not have been your intent; I presume it is not. But that is precisely the message you are giving off, and it is both offensive and counter-productive to the necessary conversations that would further your goal.

[1] The entire concept of "white people" and "black people" was invented in colonial America as justification for enslaving one group, and for convincing poor European colonists that it was OK that they were abused by rich colonists as long as they weren't black. Europeans of different countries hated each other just fine back in Europe without need to use skin color as a justification. All of Europe being "white" is just as made-up as all of Africa being "black."

--Larry Garfield

4 years ago by Chuck Adams — view source

unread

I might suggest that we at least confine any renaming to things that
are user-visible and not worry about the source code. Except they're
going to need aliases for all time, that's just a fact. Although I'm
all about addressing the injustices of the past and present, I think
it would be a lot more productive to spend our effort on future
naming.

I have pretty different connotations for "blacklist" anyway, seeing it
less as an exclude pattern and more of a "never allow this because
it's really bad if you do". Like the blacklisted keys unix distros
keep after that a critical security bug in ssh a ways back.

Let's look forward AND backward, but mostly forward. And with my
awesome rhetorical skills, I single handedly put this matter to bed,
right? ;)

--c

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 3:12 PM Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com wrote:

Hi Larry,

I appreciate your answer, thank you, but i would like to clarify some points:

I found 170 occurrences of the term blacklist - grep -rni "blacklist" php-src/, i'm working to understand the impact of changes;

It’s not about politics, i believe it’s about learning how to be better humans;

I fully agree;

Sometimes it's necessary "broken window policing";

I truly recognize this, and respect above all.

However if the majority disagree with the changes it is not worth pursuing this discussion, and I should not even write an RFC for that.

--
Cheers,

Daniel Rodrigues

https://twitter.com/geekcom2

De: Larry Garfield larry@garfieldtech.com
Enviado: segunda-feira, 15 de junho de 2020 17:21
Para: php internals internals@lists.php.net
Assunto: Re: [PHP-DEV] About the use of the terms master/slave and blacklist, proposal to replace.

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 7:46 PM Alain D D Williams addw@phcomp.co.uk
wrote:

It is very easy to take offence when none is meant at all. One needs to
look at intent.

Hi,

I'm going to disagree here. It's not about intent, it's about impact. You
can have the best intentions with the worst results.

When I read the replies here, it makes me sad. The comments come from a
place of white privilege and I'm sad to see that's how people think about
it.

Regards,
Lynn

What saddens me is that these terms are non issues, and think they do
something for "good" when it's just a pat on the back without doing any
tangible change to the world.

Case in point, from what I've seen mostly going around in the French
community [1] is that the people who are actually concerned think it's
woke and completely nonsensical. And I could argue the white-privelege
here is to discuss these matters and imagine they would improve something.

For blacklist/whitelist the benefit of changing it is that we can use more
descriptive terminology such as deny/block/disallow and their opposite
depending on context, which probably is more accessible to non-native
English speakers. And if one wants to change it this should be the angle.

However, I would argue that if when someone hears the word black the
first thing which comes to their mind is race, then that makes them more
of a racist and not the other people who use this with the well defined
meaning. As such I would argue this is undermining the meaning of the
word and pushing us towards an orwellian [2] state of the world.

Moreover, black does not always mean something is "bad", see martial
arts where a black belt is synonymous with experience and a white belt
means that you are a novice.

So instead of taking offence on behalf of a whole group and proposing
changes which don't affect said group in any meaningful way while
causing BC. Because if we decided to accept doing this, I shall start
being offended about the usage of the word string as in French string
means a thong and I imagine French women to be outraged that we
(predominantly white males) casually talk about splitting or comparing
strings.

Best

George P. Banyard

[1] https://twitter.com/jesuisundev/status/1269260740894117890
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe64p-QzhNE

I am so going to regret being in this thread, but...

Data point: My boss at work noted earlier that he'd reached out to some black women he knows to get their take; their response to him was that blacklist/whitelist did bother them, but "master branch" did not.

Of course, with GitHub now deciding to change its standards that is going to percolate to the rest of the industry sooner or later, regardless of whether it's a good idea or a stupid waste of time. It's going to happen now.

It should be noted that a person saying "I am offended" does not, in fact, make something automatically offensive, or that you should always assume that their position is right, or justified, or that you should take action as a result. As evidence, I cite that I find "Native American" offensive because it implies one group of people is truly "from" a place rightly, and no one else is no matter how long they've been here; that's despite the fact that every group of people everywhere in history has moved around, a lot, and no one is "native" to anywhere if you go back far enough, and genetic groups and cultural groups migrate independently of each other (much as we like to to pretend otherwise). In fact the term isn't even preferred by the people it refers to[1]. But no one listens to me, because I'm not in a group that's allowed to be offended. There's way more politics around "offense" than anyone is willing to admit. (And that's not a left or right specific issue.)

Also, point of order to Ben: Free Software is political[2]. Open Source was very specifically created to be the de-politicized, amoral version that companies could leverage without having to bother with that ethics stuff. That's literally the history. It's also why I support Free Software. (Note: That attempt is largely unsuccessful because all software is inherently political, but credit where it's due, please.)

Having been through these conversations multiple times before, I would urge everyone to keep in mind the following:

As Nikita said, without an actionable todo item to discuss, there's nothing productive to discuss.

If you are able to find a reason for a change other than "because it's offensive not to," do it, and push that angle. Make the political angle secondary. It makes it more palatable.

For the love of God, do not go into this or similar discussions assuming that anyone who disagrees with you is a bad person. I know it's hard, especially on touchy topics, but that is how communication dies. Wanting to change whitelist/blacklist does not make someone a troublemaker just trying to cause trouble for little value. Opposing that same change does not make someone racist, or uncaring, or "OMG privilege so we don't have to listen to you," or whatever. I've seen that pattern appear way the hell too many times, and it's toxic, and does nothing but poison communities.

Let's all understand that language changes like this are at best broken window policing, and I use that term very deliberately. If you really care about addressing persistent inequality in the world. get your butt out to a Black Lives Matter march, write your legislator, join a reform group, work on hiring practices in your own company, or do something else that requires actual work. That goes for everyone.

Acknowledge that there are very likely a lot of people on this list who are doing the things in point 4 already, but still oppose the language changes. Whether you agree with them or not, that's an acceptable and valid position for them to take. Please respect that.

[1] https://youtu.be/kh88fVP2FWQ
[2] https://peakd.com/programming/@crell/free-software-is-political

--Larry Garfield

4 years ago by Deleu — view source

unread

+1.

While I agree that the status of the php project makes the discussion much
more productive by having an actionable process in place, I do sympathize
with the original author in the thread. You can see that with a simple and
small action that is highlighted in the RFC guide as step 1 (gauge people's
opinion on the mailing list), there's already a ton of negativity towards
said action.
People arguing BC breaks without even knowing the scope of the change
clearly show biased.

As white men, we're being dismissive, insensitive and strongly suggesting
we don't want change. While people may not feel offended by any of these
terms being discussed, this thread alone already serves as reason for
people to feel like there's no room for diversity in the internal community
of php.
I believe that if we cannot come together to take the small (potentially
insignificant) step towards making changes that signal a welcoming
environment, how are we going to actually take the big steps?

Nobody writes an entire system without writing its first "hello world".

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 7:46 PM Alain D D Williams addw@phcomp.co.uk
wrote:

It is very easy to take offence when none is meant at all. One needs to
look at intent.

Hi,

I'm going to disagree here. It's not about intent, it's about impact. You
can have the best intentions with the worst results.

When I read the replies here, it makes me sad. The comments come from a
place of white privilege and I'm sad to see that's how people think about
it.

Regards,
Lynn

4 years ago by mail@pmmaga.net — view source

unread

People arguing BC breaks without even knowing the scope of the change
clearly show biased.

Bold assumption there. There is at least one PR suggesting similar changes
and you can gauge the amount of BC based on it. Unless "blacklist" is not
supposed to be included in this change (even though it is in the title of
the OP), there will be a BC. People with different opinions doesn't mean
they are uninformed.

4 years ago by Daniel Rodrigues Lima — view source

unread

As additional information, i would like to add that Michał Brzuchalski (brzuchal), has an open PR in order to change the blacklist terminology in PHP.

https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/5685

--
Greets,

Daniel Rodrigues.

geekcom@php.net
https://twitter.com/geekcom2

De: Pedro Magalhães mail@pmmaga.net
Enviado: segunda-feira, 15 de junho de 2020 18:50
Para: Deleu deleugyn@gmail.com
Cc: Lynn kjarli@gmail.com; PHP internals internals@lists.php.net
Assunto: Re: [PHP-DEV] About the use of the terms master/slave and blacklist, proposal to replace.

People arguing BC breaks without even knowing the scope of the change
clearly show biased.

Bold assumption there. There is at least one PR suggesting similar changes
and you can gauge the amount of BC based on it. Unless "blacklist" is not
supposed to be included in this change (even though it is in the title of
the OP), there will be a BC. People with different opinions doesn't mean
they are uninformed.

4 years ago by Sara Golemon — view source

unread

As white men, we're being dismissive, insensitive and strongly suggesting
we don't want change. While people may not feel offended by any of these
terms being discussed, this thread alone already serves as reason for
people to feel like there's no room for diversity in the internal community
of php.

This. We are (by and large) an awfully pasty group to be saying "This
isn't a real problem" and dismissing it out of hand.

A white person saying, "These words aren't problematic" is like responding
on bugs.php.net with "It works on my machine".

I believe that if we cannot come together to take the small (potentially
insignificant) step towards making changes that signal a welcoming
environment, how are we going to actually take the big steps?

OP initially came to Gabriel and I (as 8.0 RMs) to judge our response on a
small scale. My answer was essentially "That's not my call, take it to
internals@" which he did, and frankly I'm disappointed by the reaction he
got. I'm not saying this HAS to happen, or even necessarily SHOULD. I
really don't know if these words are a problem or not because I'M NOT
QUALIFIED to answer that question. I really wish we'd had a better
discussion than what we've started with though.

As to BC; You know I hate BC breaks for academic reasons, and (at the
moment) this certainly feels like a BC break for academic reasons, but
again... Don't know how abstract the problem is, just offering my pasty
hot-take. It also doesn't have to be a violent BC break. We can alias new
names to old and have a nice leisurely migration path on the way to 9.0 (or
even 10.0).

Last, regarding neutrality. This proposal is literally aimed at adopting
more-neutral language. It's not a partisan move to say that harmful
language should be avoided.

-Sara

4 years ago by Stanislav Malyshev — view source

unread

Hi!

Last, regarding neutrality. This proposal is literally aimed at adopting
more-neutral language. It's not a partisan move to say that harmful
language should be avoided.

It is a decidedly political claim that long-time industry standard term
with established neutral meaning is suddenly "harmful". And I really
resent the implication of "the color of our skin means you don't get to
have an opinion on this topic" that was made here.

That said, I personally am not going to read any messages on this topic
for a while because I have enough negative emotions lately in my life
without this.

Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com

4 years ago by Reinis Rozitis — view source

unread

Last, regarding neutrality. This proposal is literally aimed at adopting more-
neutral language. It's not a partisan move to say that harmful language
should be avoided.

The problem (imo) is projecting/tying relations and social interactions (past and present) between people onto machine code (and nowadays also everything else) instead of explaining that there is no connection (the idea itself to declare that black is bad and white good for everything is absurd (was mentioned as an argument) - different cultures/nations have wildly wide range symbolisms regarding colors and now for some reason there is suddenly only one?).

But if current (php) code is considered harmful/offending the next proposal/rfc should be to remove every "kill child/parent" fpm (possibly other sapis) /pcntl,posix (kill_children() from the tests) also die() and *_execute etc. as no sane person would agree that it's even remotely normal not to say more.

rr

4 years ago by Kalle Sommer Nielsen — view source

unread

Hi

Den tir. 16. jun. 2020 kl. 00.41 skrev Deleu deleugyn@gmail.com:

People arguing BC breaks without even knowing the scope of the change
clearly show biased.

I am sorry but I do not think you understand the scale of which the
PHP project is at. Any change we make to the language has consequences
for hundreds of millions of websites running PHP, potentially millions
of developers who work with PHP and so on. Therefore any change that
breaks backwards compatibility in any way has to be justified. We have
a rather strict BC policy, something that allowed you and millions of
others to easily upgrade from PHP5 to PHP7 with next to no changes for
the most part. Do I personally believe that a change of name for some
directives, potentially more, are justified? No I do not. That is my
personal bias here.

Let's assume that 10% of the current user base of PHP upgrades to
whatever version a change like this is implemented. The number of work
hours spent on investigating, updating, testing and patching these BC
breaks which are changes for the sake of change is a crazy amount of
hours invested into it. Opcache is a very popular extension, changing
an ini directive means change of build systems, you can certainly
argue that these changes could potentially just be changed by a tool,
but even doing so will have cost a substantial amount of hours to
implement and test. It is easily in the thousands of hours, a normal
work year for me is about 1900 hours in terms of hours for just one
person. Demanding that our users should invest so many hours besides
the usual amount for already upgrading to a PHP version is lunacy,
especially if the change is to try censor something that has no
correlation to any racial slurs.

So to say that the arguments about BC breaks (which I believe I was
the only one to post about in this thread) without knowing the scope
of the change is void. Yes, any policy for backwards compatibility
breaks can easily be classified as biased, because they are an opinion
of the project as a whole, or rather, a policy.

As white men, we're being dismissive, insensitive and strongly suggesting
we don't want change. While people may not feel offended by any of these
terms being discussed, this thread alone already serves as reason for
people to feel like there's no room for diversity in the internal community
of php.

The "we" in this is extremely biased, it attempts to force me to feel
as an inferior human (to steal the term from Larry above), because I
do not agree with your request for a change. The classification you
just did there is something I personally would feel offended by,
because you attempt to use my ethnicity as an argument for why I feel
the way I feel.

I believe that if we cannot come together to take the small (potentially
insignificant) step towards making changes that signal a welcoming
environment, how are we going to actually take the big steps?

We could start by taking steps that matters for once, censoring words
that have no correlation to any racial issue because it might offend
someone because it has the word black in it. What about whitespace? Am
I a nothing, an empty space just because I am caucassian? There are
other issues we should tackle to make PHP better, after all, we have a
major version in the works, set to release later this year. Something
(excuse my bias here) is way more important than trying to justify
backwards compatibility breaks for no reason.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Deleu — view source

unread

I am sorry but I do not think you understand the scale of which the
PHP project is at.

I'm sorry but you did not get my point. As mentioned above theres 170
places mentioning the term blacklist. When I said "the argument of BC
without knowing the scope" I meant to express that perhaps 1, 10 or 100 of
these could be changed without any BC impact, meaning that perhaps they
barely need an RFC in the first place as it could potentially be just
internal code. Instead of being negative and dismissive of a chance at a
diverse and welcoming environment, let's see what we can easily do first
and take the first step towards making a statement in favor of a better
community.

Hi

Den tir. 16. jun. 2020 kl. 00.41 skrev Deleu deleugyn@gmail.com:

People arguing BC breaks without even knowing the scope of the change
clearly show biased.

I am sorry but I do not think you understand the scale of which the
PHP project is at. Any change we make to the language has consequences
for hundreds of millions of websites running PHP, potentially millions
of developers who work with PHP and so on. Therefore any change that
breaks backwards compatibility in any way has to be justified. We have
a rather strict BC policy, something that allowed you and millions of
others to easily upgrade from PHP5 to PHP7 with next to no changes for
the most part. Do I personally believe that a change of name for some
directives, potentially more, are justified? No I do not. That is my
personal bias here.

Let's assume that 10% of the current user base of PHP upgrades to
whatever version a change like this is implemented. The number of work
hours spent on investigating, updating, testing and patching these BC
breaks which are changes for the sake of change is a crazy amount of
hours invested into it. Opcache is a very popular extension, changing
an ini directive means change of build systems, you can certainly
argue that these changes could potentially just be changed by a tool,
but even doing so will have cost a substantial amount of hours to
implement and test. It is easily in the thousands of hours, a normal
work year for me is about 1900 hours in terms of hours for just one
person. Demanding that our users should invest so many hours besides
the usual amount for already upgrading to a PHP version is lunacy,
especially if the change is to try censor something that has no
correlation to any racial slurs.

So to say that the arguments about BC breaks (which I believe I was
the only one to post about in this thread) without knowing the scope
of the change is void. Yes, any policy for backwards compatibility
breaks can easily be classified as biased, because they are an opinion
of the project as a whole, or rather, a policy.

As white men, we're being dismissive, insensitive and strongly suggesting
we don't want change. While people may not feel offended by any of these
terms being discussed, this thread alone already serves as reason for
people to feel like there's no room for diversity in the internal
community
of php.

The "we" in this is extremely biased, it attempts to force me to feel
as an inferior human (to steal the term from Larry above), because I
do not agree with your request for a change. The classification you
just did there is something I personally would feel offended by,
because you attempt to use my ethnicity as an argument for why I feel
the way I feel.

I believe that if we cannot come together to take the small (potentially
insignificant) step towards making changes that signal a welcoming
environment, how are we going to actually take the big steps?

We could start by taking steps that matters for once, censoring words
that have no correlation to any racial issue because it might offend
someone because it has the word black in it. What about whitespace? Am
I a nothing, an empty space just because I am caucassian? There are
other issues we should tackle to make PHP better, after all, we have a
major version in the works, set to release later this year. Something
(excuse my bias here) is way more important than trying to justify
backwards compatibility breaks for no reason.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Kalle Sommer Nielsen — view source

unread

Den tir. 16. jun. 2020 kl. 02.12 skrev Deleu deleugyn@gmail.com:

I am sorry but I do not think you understand the scale of which the
PHP project is at.

I'm sorry but you did not get my point. As mentioned above theres 170 places mentioning the term blacklist. When I said "the argument of BC without knowing the scope" I meant to express that perhaps 1, 10 or 100 of these could be changed without any BC impact, meaning that perhaps they barely need an RFC in the first place as it could potentially be just internal code. Instead of being negative and dismissive of a chance at a diverse and welcoming environment, let's see what we can easily do first and take the first step towards making a statement in favor of a better community.

So let me get this straight, you feel uneasy that internally in PHP
there is something called blacklist, a variable or something that, and
changing those are making a statement in favor of a better community.
Well that is also a biased opinion, I am certain we can dispute what
is better for the community for days without end. What purpose does it
serve to change the internal variables from blacklist to blocklist
when it still needs to interact with the term blacklist, why would we
use two different terminologies for the same thing?

I am being negative towards this change because like I have stated
before that it is a change for the sake of change and I do not find
the justifications presented here to be strong enough reason to break
working code because you feel offended by some political propaganda
that has made you believe that blacklist is a racial slur, or whatever
it might be. Censoring industry terms that has correlation to racial
remarks whatsoever sends a signal that "Hey the PHP project would
rather allow breaking your code because it needs to be diverse", what
happens when the next flavor of the month term comes that needs to be
censored for whatever reason, should we then also break that? Because
if that was the case we could do that nonstop.

I still don't think it will make the community better by breaking
already working code. To say that the current naming is not diverse
and welcoming is almost disrespectful in itself.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Daniel Rodrigues Lima — view source

unread

The simple fact that we don't know how to deal with this type of discussion can say a lot about of our community.
Anyway when I started this discussion I didn't imagine that I would receive so many negative feedbacks.

--
Cheers,

Daniel Rodrigues.

geekcom@php.net
https://twitter.com/geekcom2

De: Kalle Sommer Nielsen kalle@php.net
Enviado: segunda-feira, 15 de junho de 2020 20:23
Para: Deleu deleugyn@gmail.com
Cc: Lynn kjarli@gmail.com; PHP internals internals@lists.php.net
Assunto: Re: [PHP-DEV] About the use of the terms master/slave and blacklist, proposal to replace.

Den tir. 16. jun. 2020 kl. 02.12 skrev Deleu deleugyn@gmail.com:

I am sorry but I do not think you understand the scale of which the
PHP project is at.

I'm sorry but you did not get my point. As mentioned above theres 170 places mentioning the term blacklist. When I said "the argument of BC without knowing the scope" I meant to express that perhaps 1, 10 or 100 of these could be changed without any BC impact, meaning that perhaps they barely need an RFC in the first place as it could potentially be just internal code. Instead of being negative and dismissive of a chance at a diverse and welcoming environment, let's see what we can easily do first and take the first step towards making a statement in favor of a better community.

So let me get this straight, you feel uneasy that internally in PHP
there is something called blacklist, a variable or something that, and
changing those are making a statement in favor of a better community.
Well that is also a biased opinion, I am certain we can dispute what
is better for the community for days without end. What purpose does it
serve to change the internal variables from blacklist to blocklist
when it still needs to interact with the term blacklist, why would we
use two different terminologies for the same thing?

I am being negative towards this change because like I have stated
before that it is a change for the sake of change and I do not find
the justifications presented here to be strong enough reason to break
working code because you feel offended by some political propaganda
that has made you believe that blacklist is a racial slur, or whatever
it might be. Censoring industry terms that has correlation to racial
remarks whatsoever sends a signal that "Hey the PHP project would
rather allow breaking your code because it needs to be diverse", what
happens when the next flavor of the month term comes that needs to be
censored for whatever reason, should we then also break that? Because
if that was the case we could do that nonstop.

I still don't think it will make the community better by breaking
already working code. To say that the current naming is not diverse
and welcoming is almost disrespectful in itself.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Kalle Sommer Nielsen — view source

unread

Den tir. 16. jun. 2020 kl. 02.39 skrev Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com:

The simple fact that we don't know how to deal with this type of discussion can say a lot about of our community.
Anyway when I started this discussion I didn't imagine that I would receive so many negative feedbacks.

I am sorry but I don't think you fully understand the implications it
may have. I get it, there is no easy answer but while the change may
be simple and elegant to rename a few places you may find problematic,
you have to understand the consequence of the users it has and what
statement it means the PHP project as a whole is sending. If we openly
change these names without further, we also declare open season for
changing anything anyone may find offensive in whatever way that may
be in the language. It sends a strong signal to our users that
reliable backwards compatibility policies we have inplace, which our
users enjoy, may no longer be as reliable. This puts a greater burden
on upgrading from one PHP version to another, if your time is just
spent on search, replace and test for things like these. I mean
personally I would much rather solve interesting problems and I do not
find censoring words like blacklist into blocklist to be an
interesting problem to solve, because I do not see it as a problem in
the first place (either in my professional world, personally or as a
PHP Core Developer).

Right now you threw the ball in the air without looking and you seem
amazed where it landed.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Daniel Rodrigues Lima — view source

unread

I fully understand the consequences of the discussion we are having here. Sorry, but it is not nice to assume things about any PHP member. I didn't "throw a ball in the air at random", and I'm not scared by the negative responses themselves, I'm just surprised in a negative way.

--
Cheers,

Daniel Rodrigues.

geekcom@php.net
https://twitter.com/geekcom2

De: Kalle Sommer Nielsen kalle@php.net
Enviado: segunda-feira, 15 de junho de 2020 20:54
Para: Daniel Rodrigues Lima danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com
Cc: Deleu deleugyn@gmail.com; Lynn kjarli@gmail.com; PHP internals internals@lists.php.net
Assunto: Re: [PHP-DEV] About the use of the terms master/slave and blacklist, proposal to replace.

Den tir. 16. jun. 2020 kl. 02.39 skrev Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com:

The simple fact that we don't know how to deal with this type of discussion can say a lot about of our community.
Anyway when I started this discussion I didn't imagine that I would receive so many negative feedbacks.

I am sorry but I don't think you fully understand the implications it
may have. I get it, there is no easy answer but while the change may
be simple and elegant to rename a few places you may find problematic,
you have to understand the consequence of the users it has and what
statement it means the PHP project as a whole is sending. If we openly
change these names without further, we also declare open season for
changing anything anyone may find offensive in whatever way that may
be in the language. It sends a strong signal to our users that
reliable backwards compatibility policies we have inplace, which our
users enjoy, may no longer be as reliable. This puts a greater burden
on upgrading from one PHP version to another, if your time is just
spent on search, replace and test for things like these. I mean
personally I would much rather solve interesting problems and I do not
find censoring words like blacklist into blocklist to be an
interesting problem to solve, because I do not see it as a problem in
the first place (either in my professional world, personally or as a
PHP Core Developer).

Right now you threw the ball in the air without looking and you seem
amazed where it landed.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Kalle Sommer Nielsen — view source

unread

Den tir. 16. jun. 2020 kl. 03.09 skrev Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com:

I fully understand the consequences of the discussion we are having here. Sorry, but it is not nice to assume things about any PHP member. I didn't "throw a ball in the air at random", and I'm not scared by the negative responses themselves, I'm just surprised in a negative way.

If you fully understand the consequences of this conversation, then
why was none of these potentially negatives laid out in the first post
for topics of problems to be resolved? The analogy of "Throw the ball
in the air randomly" was meant to show no research besides a few links
was posted, there was no concrete plan that lists potential issues you
would need to overcome to accomplish this in the first place, similar
to what Nikita pointed out, there was no research done on this in the
first place either. Which is why I doubt (assume) that you did not
fully understand the consequences of the conversation, it did not
leave me with the impression in any way that you did, if you say you
do that now then okay I believe you. I am in no way implying you
should be scared by the responses.

But you still have not provided any potential direction you wish to
take other than "What do you think about changing X symbol name to Y
symbol name?" (if you boil the question down). You listed the only pro
as using naming that does not cause negative feelings for black people
specifically in your first post. There have been no cons listed
either, you have heard some from some of the actual language
maintainers and some for the community. You did not mention how you
plan to tackle upgrade paths, targeted versions or anything. If you
just throw the question out there without a concrete plan to begin
with, you are not gonna get far. If you however take an active lead
and steer the direction of your plan, then the conversation would
potentially look different because then you could begin to flesh out
the problems at hand and come with a unified solution that could
perhaps satisfy the audience that you need for this change to pass.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Daniel Rodrigues Lima — view source

unread

How is it in the process of creating an RFC...

"1. Email internals@lists.php.net to measure reaction to your intended proposal. "

--
Cheers,

Daniel Rodrigues.

geekcom@php.net
https://twitter.com/geekcom2

De: Kalle Sommer Nielsen kalle@php.net
Enviado: segunda-feira, 15 de junho de 2020 21:23
Para: Daniel Rodrigues Lima danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com
Cc: Deleu deleugyn@gmail.com; Lynn kjarli@gmail.com; PHP Internals internals@lists.php.net
Assunto: Re: [PHP-DEV] About the use of the terms master/slave and blacklist, proposal to replace.

Den tir. 16. jun. 2020 kl. 03.09 skrev Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com:

I fully understand the consequences of the discussion we are having here. Sorry, but it is not nice to assume things about any PHP member. I didn't "throw a ball in the air at random", and I'm not scared by the negative responses themselves, I'm just surprised in a negative way.

If you fully understand the consequences of this conversation, then
why was none of these potentially negatives laid out in the first post
for topics of problems to be resolved? The analogy of "Throw the ball
in the air randomly" was meant to show no research besides a few links
was posted, there was no concrete plan that lists potential issues you
would need to overcome to accomplish this in the first place, similar
to what Nikita pointed out, there was no research done on this in the
first place either. Which is why I doubt (assume) that you did not
fully understand the consequences of the conversation, it did not
leave me with the impression in any way that you did, if you say you
do that now then okay I believe you. I am in no way implying you
should be scared by the responses.

But you still have not provided any potential direction you wish to
take other than "What do you think about changing X symbol name to Y
symbol name?" (if you boil the question down). You listed the only pro
as using naming that does not cause negative feelings for black people
specifically in your first post. There have been no cons listed
either, you have heard some from some of the actual language
maintainers and some for the community. You did not mention how you
plan to tackle upgrade paths, targeted versions or anything. If you
just throw the question out there without a concrete plan to begin
with, you are not gonna get far. If you however take an active lead
and steer the direction of your plan, then the conversation would
potentially look different because then you could begin to flesh out
the problems at hand and come with a unified solution that could
perhaps satisfy the audience that you need for this change to pass.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Kalle Sommer Nielsen — view source

unread

Den tir. 16. jun. 2020 kl. 03.30 skrev Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com:

How is it in the process of creating an RFC...

"1. Email internals@lists.php.net to measure reaction to your intended proposal. "

That is the thing, do you intend to provide no upgrade path for your
proposal? You don't mention what version of PHP you are even
targeting, or am I to understand that your proposal has none? Does it
mean that these changes goes into the next releases of 7.3.x, 7.4.x
and 8.0.0? Is it only 8.0.0? etc. these are all basic questions that
any other RFC proposal answers when it is brought to the mailing list.
You can search the mail archives to get some examples of how it
usually is laid out.

To clarify, you sent a discussion topic. There is nothing about any
RFC intention in your first post (or subject line that most others
do). Before a proposal can begin to be understood it has to be fleshed
out, you need to have a solid argument for, upgrade paths, solutions
to potential problems, open quests (you got a fair few from this
thread alone) and so on, there is plenty of RFCs on the wiki you can
use as a base example for yours. I think the confusion here is the
misunderstanding of what the term "proposal" mean in the copied list
point you sent me above. A proposal means the actual first version of
the RFC, a soft version if you will.

The complete list point is:
Email internals@lists.php.net to measure reaction to your intended
proposal. State who would implement the feature, or whether the
proposal is only a “concept”. Proceed with an RFC if feedback is not
negative or if a detailed RFC will clarify the proposal. Mail list
subscription is at http://php.net/mailing-lists.php. (Reminder: always
"bottom post" your replies. Never “top post”.)

Your initial post does not state who should implement this feature
either, or if this is only a concept.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Daniel Rodrigues Lima — view source

unread

Thanks Kalle.

--
Cheers,

Daniel Rodrigues.

geekcom@php.net
https://twitter.com/geekcom2

De: Kalle Sommer Nielsen kalle@php.net
Enviado: segunda-feira, 15 de junho de 2020 21:43
Para: Daniel Rodrigues Lima danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com
Cc: PHP Internals internals@lists.php.net
Assunto: Re: [PHP-DEV] About the use of the terms master/slave and blacklist, proposal to replace.

Den tir. 16. jun. 2020 kl. 03.30 skrev Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com:

How is it in the process of creating an RFC...

"1. Email internals@lists.php.net to measure reaction to your intended proposal. "

That is the thing, do you intend to provide no upgrade path for your
proposal? You don't mention what version of PHP you are even
targeting, or am I to understand that your proposal has none? Does it
mean that these changes goes into the next releases of 7.3.x, 7.4.x
and 8.0.0? Is it only 8.0.0? etc. these are all basic questions that
any other RFC proposal answers when it is brought to the mailing list.
You can search the mail archives to get some examples of how it
usually is laid out.

To clarify, you sent a discussion topic. There is nothing about any
RFC intention in your first post (or subject line that most others
do). Before a proposal can begin to be understood it has to be fleshed
out, you need to have a solid argument for, upgrade paths, solutions
to potential problems, open quests (you got a fair few from this
thread alone) and so on, there is plenty of RFCs on the wiki you can
use as a base example for yours. I think the confusion here is the
misunderstanding of what the term "proposal" mean in the copied list
point you sent me above. A proposal means the actual first version of
the RFC, a soft version if you will.

The complete list point is:
Email internals@lists.php.net to measure reaction to your intended
proposal. State who would implement the feature, or whether the
proposal is only a “concept”. Proceed with an RFC if feedback is not
negative or if a detailed RFC will clarify the proposal. Mail list
subscription is at http://php.net/mailing-lists.php. (Reminder: always
"bottom post" your replies. Never “top post”.)

Your initial post does not state who should implement this feature
either, or if this is only a concept.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

4 years ago by Chuck Adams — view source

unread

Oh man, not this again, not here. Nothing intelligent ever comes out of this.

Looks like most instances in the PHP source refer to mysql constants,
which means the ball would be in mysql's court. Reality is you'd
still need the aliases that contain the offending word.

The other is in ext/standard/proc_open.c, referring to a "slave pty".
Seems pretty trivial to change.

But "trivial" is the operative word here. Go join a protest and/or
call your congressperson if you want to actually do something
constructive.

Heck, it's not a big list. How about nobody EVEN starts on the name
of the branch...

✔ ~/proj/php/php-src [master|✔]$ ag slave
ext/standard/tests/file/userstreams.phpt
17:to the game you stay a slave

ext/standard/proc_open.c
613:static int set_proc_descriptor_to_pty(descriptorspec_item *desc,
int *master_fd, int slave_fd)
616: / All FDs set to PTY in the child process will go to the slave
end of the same PTY.
620: * slave FDs. */
622: if (openpty(master_fd, slave_fd, NULL, NULL, NULL)) {
629: desc->childend = dup(*slave_fd);
761: int ndesc, int nindex, int *pty_master_fd, int pty_slave_fd) {
803: / Set descriptor to slave end of PTY */
804: retval = set_proc_descriptor_to_pty(&descriptors[ndesc],
pty_master_fd, pty_slave_fd);
925: int pty_master_fd = -1, pty_slave_fd = -1;
998: &pty_master_fd, &pty_slave_fd) == FAILURE) {
1220: if (pty_slave_fd != -1) {
1221: close(pty_slave_fd);

ext/mysqlnd/mysqlnd_enum_n_def.h
599: STAT_COM_REGISTER_SLAVE,
664: COM_REGISTER_SLAVE,
692:#define MYSQLND_REFRESH_SLAVE 64 /* Reset master info and restart slave */

ext/mysqlnd/mysqlnd_libmysql_compat.h
127:#define REFRESH_SLAVE MYSQLND_REFRESH_SLAVE

ext/mysqlnd/mysqlnd_wireprotocol.c
52: "TABLE_DUMP", "CONNECT_OUT", "REGISTER_SLAVE",

ext/mysqlnd/mysqlnd_statistics.c
181: { MYSQLND_STR_W_LEN("com_register_slave") },

ext/gd/libgd/gd_png.c
365: /* 2.0.12: Slaven Rezic: palette images are not the only images

ext/mysqli/tests/mysqli_constants.phpt
97: "MYSQLI_REFRESH_SLAVE" => true,
200: $expected_constants["MYSQLI_RPL_SLAVE"] = true;

ext/mysqli/tests/mysqli_get_client_stats.phpt
1250: ["com_register_slave"]=>

ext/mysqli/mysqli.c
818: REGISTER_LONG_CONSTANT("MYSQLI_REFRESH_SLAVE",
REFRESH_SLAVE, CONST_CS | CONST_PERSISTENT);
✔ ~/proj/php/php-src [master|✔]$

--c

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 9:43 AM Daniel Rodrigues Lima
danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com wrote:

Hi internals,

I think the time has come for the PHP internals to discuss the use of master/slave and blacklist terminologies.
As everyone can see, we are going through times of change in the world, see #blackLivesMatter for example.
Therefore, I propose that we discuss the non-use of terms master/slave, because the use of this can allude to the slavery and negative feelings about black people.

Some projects that changed the terminology:

https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/commit/8e9c76d33dab4095c9066072076f368193e4166d

https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/236857/

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-2248

https://bugs.python.org/issue34605

Greets,

Daniel Rodrigues.

geekcom@php.net mailto:geekcom@php.net
https://twitter.com/geekcom2
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielrodrigueslima/

4 years ago by Daniel Rodrigues Lima — view source

unread

Hi Chuck,

About the blacklist , I searched the branch master and found 170 occurrences.

✔ grep -rni "blacklist" php-src/ > blacklist_occurrences.txt

--
Cheers,

Daniel Rodrigues

geekcom@php.net
https://twitter.com/geekcom2

De: Chuck Adams cja987@gmail.com
Enviado: segunda-feira, 15 de junho de 2020 15:18
Para: Daniel Rodrigues Lima danielrodrigues-ti@hotmail.com
Cc: PHP Internals internals@lists.php.net
Assunto: Re: [PHP-DEV] About the use of the terms master/slave and blacklist, proposal to replace.