hi Neal,
Thanks for bringing this up. Independent of who is "right" (or simply
"more right") about the merits of these changes, I support the use of
language in the project that is broadly accepted as neutral. If a term
used is neutral and clearly communicates its function, then we should
use that. If there is disagreement about a term's neutrality, then it
would be better to choose an alternative where there is not debate.
Having debates about whether or not something is neutral can become a
political or ideological matter, and I'd prefer to avoid even the
possibility of such issues in this project.
Renaming our default branch to "develop" or similar sounds good to me.
It's true that it would create some disruption of tools that have
"master" hard-coded but as a one-time change I think from a technical
standpoint I think it's something we can handle. On
whitelist/blacklist similarly I think allow/deny or include/exclude is
not only more neutral but also more clear with regard to function.
Thanks,
Wes
On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 2:56 PM Neal Richardson
<neal.p.richard...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
> As you're likely aware, there's growing momentum in the developer community
> to drop terminology that some find offensive. As a project that takes pride
> in being welcoming and inclusive, I think this is something we should get
> in front of--particularly as we're approaching a 1.0 release.
>
> Specifically, I am proposing to:
>
> 1. rename the "master" branch to something else ("main" seems to be
> popular; other version control systems use other words too).
>
> 2. replace "whitelist"/"blacklist" in our code with something like
> "allowlist"/"blocklist", or otherwise renaming. A quick search of code
> shows that we don't use them much, but there are some places in Archery
> that do, as well as some vendored code (which we could look to see if
> that's been updated upstream and pull in changes).
>
> These are unrelated changes and we can address them independently.
>
> Changing the default branch is potentially disruptive, though
> https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBranchFromMasterToMain.aspx
> doesn't sound so bad: you can run 6 lines to update your local git checkout
> to recognize the new default branch. Fresh clones from GitHub will
> automatically have the default branch set correctly.
>
> At least one Apache project has gotten to the point of requesting INFRA to
> change the default branch (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-20403)
> and I would expect there are others that are somewhere in the process of
> deciding. Many other projects and organizations, including git and GitHub,
> are debating this too. I'm not optimistic that we could just wait for ASF
> to make some decision and implement this for all projects--they are still
> named "Apache" after all--so I think this on us to do.
>
> Thoughts? I suspect that the default branch naming may elicit more reaction
> and require debate (and a vote?); as for the whitelist/blacklist, I'll work
> on a patch for that tomorrow unless there's strong objection, and we can
> review specific lines on the PR.
>
> Thanks,
> Neal
