Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

[Dave Cridland <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2018 at 17:10, Nico Williams <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 12:51:18PM +0100, Dave Cridland wrote:
> > Back when I was even more clueless than I am today, and actually ran DNS
> > servers, we used the terms "primary" and "secondary" as a matter of
> course.
> > Secondaries copied the data from primaries.
> >
> > So far, so good.
> >
> > Then we added a third nameserver, and of course that must be the
> tertiary,
> > used only when *both* the primary and secondary had failed.
> >
> > When I realised my stupidity, I avoided the terms "primary" and
> "secondary"
> > in the workplace, and instead used the terms "master" and "slave", which
> > were less easily confused - or rather, made me less easily confused by
> > them. The fact that "master/slave" was well understood within engineering
> > helped enormously.
>
> I use master/replica or primary/replica (in case anyone takes offense at
> "master" even in a context in which "slave" does not appear).
>
>
"master" and "replica" seem fine to me.


> > "Blacklist" and "whitelist" are well-known terms, but they can be avoided
> > with small effort to provide synonyms which are more easily understood -
>
> Do these terms have racial etymologies, or is a racial tinge being
> inferred where there has been none?
>
> Consider that English is my third language.  Why would I know the answer
> to this question?  A brief search seems to indicate that their origins
> are not racial, but perhaps I'm wrong.  E.g.,
>
> http://garysaid.com/are-the-terms-whitelist-and-blacklist-racist/
>
> Note that using other colors could still give rise to objections.
>
>
Yeah, the etymology is not racist. Most cultures - possibly all cultures -
associate white with light and goodness, and black with darkness and evil.

Other connotations are different, mind - black is associated with death,
authority, and so on in Europe, whereas white gets death in Asia (and, I
think, Australia).


> > "Blocklist" and "Permitlist" are trivial examples here. But if someone
> says
> > "There is a whitelist", then I also know the default is to deny. So we'll
> > need to be a bit more explicit about the default state, perhaps. In other
> > words, I worry about changing these terms, but the possibility for
> > confusion is low if we do.
>
> Blacklisting is a bad idea in most cases anyways.  A whitelist in a
> world without a blacklist shouldn't have racial tinge imputed, right?
>
>
While there's no etymological basis for whitelist and blacklist being
racist, I can understand why it's not a connotation we want to use if
possible.

Dave.