On 8/18/2020 1:43 PM, Richard Cochran wrote:
> There is an industry wide effort underway to replace historically and
> culturally loaded terms like master/slave with neutral alternatives.
> The IEEE 1588 committee will most likely amend the standard, but so
> far no consensus on the new terminology has been reached.
>
> Most of the proposed alternative terms are, IMHO, either awful
> sounding or just plain silly. There is a window of opportunity for
> this project to take the lead in recommending terminology that is, at
> the same time, both culturally neutral and technically more accurate.
>
> The original designation of the PTP port roles made little sense in
> the first place. Under the institution of slavery, the role of a
> slave is to perform work for the master. In a PTP network it is the
> "master" port that serves the slaves, the opposite of what the terms
> suggest.
>
> The information flowing through a PTP network may best be described as
> a time signal. As any EE will tell you, a signal flows from its
> source to one or more sinks. Thus we can trace the time signal in a
> PTP network as it flows from a given time source to a time sink.
>
> The approach I'm considering is to start today with the human readable
> program help, after that the man pages, and later on the identifiers
> in the program. With very few exceptions, none of the re-naming would
> impact any existing user configuration scripts. We will take care not
> to cause issues for the myriad deployments of this software world wide.
>
Yep, makes sense. Long term, after changing the stuff which doesn't
impact config, we can work towards finding a way to deprecate and rename
config options in a way that won't break existing deployment. I'm
personally Ok with simply leaving the original name as a deprecated
alternative name with an explanation.
> Thanks,
> Richard
>
>
> Richard Cochran (1):
> Convert usage messages to time source/sink terminology.
>
> phc2sys.c | 10 +++++-----
> ptp4l.c | 2 +-
> 2 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
>
This gets a +1 from me!
Thanks,
Jake
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