Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

[Anton Ivanov <[e-mail]>]

On 9/20/18 1:48 PM, Michal Krsek wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I understand those words may be inappropriate in some contexts, but 
> they are fine in other contexts.
>
> Not touching the IT area, how we teach history?

Presently? In most of the World? By rewriting it. So let's not even go 
there and not use that as a gold standard.

>
>
> I'd say - our master/slave act means something else than enslaving 
> people, man-in-the-middle is a system not a male person, debugging 
> means something else than disinfection and so on.
>
> We do have our jargon for long time and I'm not sure if it is a clever 
> idea to start building a Tower of Babel 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel .

+1. I propose we keep things as is.

They are not anywhere as offensive as some other IT terminology like for 
example using "grooming" to describe the process of evaluating current 
bugs and issues. And let's not even start on what routing means in some 
parts of the English speaking world.

A.

>
>                     Michal
>
>
> On 20/09/2018 14:15, Roberta Maglione (robmgl) wrote:
>> I agree with the comments made below: in my opinion there is nothing 
>> wrong in using terms like master/slave, white/black lists, man-in the 
>> middle, etc.
>> In the context of IETF we are using them as part of technical 
>> discussions: if you don’t take them out of the context in my opinion 
>> there is nothing wrong with these words.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Roberta
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ietf <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Petr Špacek
>> Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2018 13:29
>> To: [e-mail]
>> Subject: Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs
>>
>> On 20/09/2018 13:25, Stewart Bryant wrote:
>>> The problem with the many proposed alternative versions of 
>>> Master/Slave that I have seen over the years, is that they fail to 
>>> express the technical importance of the absolute relationship 
>>> between the two entities.
>>>
>>> The term master/slave is used when it is technically required that 
>>> the instruction is executed without equivocation. Indeed in 
>>> hardware-land, dithering over what to do (metastability) is so 
>>> catastrophic that many technical measures need to be taken to avoid it.
>>>
>>> If all the master-slave flip-flops in the Internet were replaced 
>>> with do-it-if-I-feel-like-it flip-flops, we would not have an Internet.
>>>
>>> In RFC-land we are mirroring the long-standing language of the 
>>> hardware designers, and having a common terminology that transcends 
>>> all aspects of logic design seems to me to be a net benefit to the 
>>> internet as a whole.
>> Yes, we always need to take context into account!
>>
>> I fully agree with with Stewart and Riccardo (previous reply) on this.
>>
>
>