SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
OpenZFS removed offensive terminology from its code
On Wednesday evening, ZFS founding developer Matthew Ahrens submitted what should have been a simple, non-controversial pull request to the OpenZFS project: wherever possible without causing technical issues, the patch removed references to "slaves" and replaced them with "dependents."
This patch in question doesn't change the way the code functions—it simply changes variable names in a way that brings them in conformance with Linux upstream device-mapper terminology, in 48 total lines of code (42 removed and 48 added; with one comment block expanded slightly to be more descriptive).
But this being the Internet, unfortunately, outraged naysayers descended on the pull request, and the comments were quickly closed to non-contributors. I first became aware of this as the moderator of the r/zfs subreddit where the overflow spilled once comments on the PR itself were no longer possible.
Related: Allowlist, Not Whitelist. Blocklist, Not Blacklist. Microsoft Lops Off Offensive Words
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @09:25AM
Two things.
1) I agree, the source is highly suspect
However!
2) The source of the article is irrelevant. The real issue is, people... all people (including me), get pulled into 'the source makes it a sensible article'.
For example, by adding a (I presume) made up, unvalidated source such as a "Black Berkeley History Professor", people give more credence to the article. Yet, what is the relevance of this specific, likely falsehood?
*Nothing*.
Why?
Well, if you read the NYT, or Fox News, should you immediately read and think "OK, I read it on the NYT/FN, therefore all of this is correct!". No. Not even remotely.
In fact, you should aspire to read EVERYTHING, from every source, and not fall prey to the logical fallacy of ad hominem attacking the source. You should read from the entire political spectrum, and by hyper critical of EVERYTHING YOU READ, regardless of source! And you should read from MANY MANY DIVERGENT sources.
Another poster here 'lolol' this article. It should not. Instead, it should read this thread, and Fox News, and CNN, and the NYT, and Russia Today, and the BBC, and all manner of other sources.
Otherwise? One is merely masturbating!