Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 2018-09-20 23:41, Niels ten Oever wrote:
> On 09/20/2018 01:25 PM, Stewart Bryant wrote:
>> The term master/slave is used when it is technically required that the instruction is executed without equivocation. 
> 
> Would leader/follower (as implemented by Django) not work just as well?
> It seems to work for them for quite a while already.

No. Master/slave, whether we like it or not, implies that A gives orders
and B has no choice but to obey them. Leader/follower doesn't have that
strength. (However, in most cases it's sufficient to name the master
but use no special name for the other nodes.)

IMHO, the only sane outcome is to use common sense as well as avoiding
clearly offensive terms. That means, to me, that master/slave and
man-in-the-middle (for example) are OK, and so are Alice, Bob and Eve
in security analysis.

Blacklist/whitelist is slightly tricky - I suppose the most PC solution
would be redlist/greenlist.

I think that one sentence in the Tao and the RFC style guide would
take care of this topic. "Don't use offensive words but apply common
sense in using 'politically correct' language."

    Brian