On 2018-01-16 05:33 PM, Ken Gaillot wrote: > As we look to release Pacemaker 2.0 and (separately) update the OCF > standard, this is a good time to revisit the terminology and syntax we > use for master/slave resources. > > I think the term "stateful resource" is a better substitute for > "master/slave resource". That would mainly be a documentation change. > > A bigger question is what to call the two roles. "Master" and "Slave" > would be continue to be accepted for backward compatibility for a long > time. Some suggestions: > > * master/worker, master/replicant, primary/backup: I'd like to avoid > terms like these. OCF and Pacemaker are application-agnostic, whereas > these terms imply particular functionality and are often associated > with particular software. > > * primary/secondary: Widely used, but sometimes associated with > particular software.
This has been used by DRBD for some time and it works well. People are used to it, and it adds consistency with other open source HA projects / Clusterlabs people. This is my top choice. > * promoted with either unpromoted, demoted, default, or started: All > OCF and Pacemaker actually care about is whether the resource agent has > been called with the promote action. "Promoted" is good, but the other > role is less obvious. > > * anything else anyone can think of For the sake of options; Active / Standby? > For Pacemaker 2, I'd like to replace the <master> resource type with > <clone stateful="true">. (The old syntax would be transparently > upgraded to the new one.) The role names themselves are not likely to > be changed in that time frame, as they are used in more external pieces > such as notification variables. But it would be the first step. > > I hope that this will be an uncontroversial change in the ClusterLabs > community, but because such changes have been heated elsewhere, here is > why this change is desirable: > > * It is *not about anyone being offended*. It is about making everyone > feel *welcome* by avoiding emotionally charged language. The terms are antiquated and loaded. I _strongly_ support changing them. > * It is *not about victimhood, guilt, blame, or punishment* of any > particular group. It is about striving for excellence, both in accuracy > of terminology and in community development. Recognizing that, though certain words may not have weight for us, but do for others, is a sign of maturity in the community. > * The long history of the terms master/slave being used in an > emotionally neutral context in engineering fields is not a reason to > continue using them. The concept of slavery *should not* be emotionally > neutral; it should evoke strong feelings. > > * Slavery is an inaccurate metaphor. The initial intent apparently was > "a master tells a slave what to do". This is a naive view of slavery. > Slavery is not an apt comparison to a system harmoniously designed to > execute tasks efficiently for a common goal. In software, it would be a > more apt comparison to botnets: something illegally taken from its > rightful ownership and being forced to perform tasks for its captor. > > * In Pacemaker's particular case, we have long said that master/slave > resources are simply for resources that can operate in two modes, and > we don't care what those two modes do or what they are called natively > by the application. While some applications use master/slave, many have > moved away from those terms, and others have always used other terms, > so it makes sense for us to adopt something more generic. Pacemaker, and HA in general, is/are projects with international reach used in all parts of the world. It is minor, technically, to change terminology with the transition to a new major version. If people have concern about compatibility, there can be support for the old terms with a deprecation warning, similar to other things being deprecated as was discussed at the last summit. Thank you for taking the lead on this. I can speak for Alteeve in saying we back this 100%. -- Digimer Papers and Projects: https://alteeve.com/w/ "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould _______________________________________________ Users mailing list: Users@clusterlabs.org http://lists.clusterlabs.org/mailman/listinfo/users Project Home: http://www.clusterlabs.org Getting started: http://www.clusterlabs.org/doc/Cluster_from_Scratch.pdf Bugs: http://bugs.clusterlabs.org
