Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Saturday June 13 2020, @12:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the who's-the-boss? dept.

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @03:33PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @03:33PM (#1007460)

    I can't help but think that if this much thought and discussion was put into the rest of the code that there would never be any bugs. I am not against the change to be clear, but I fail to see how this is going to make anyone's lives better.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @05:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @05:27AM (#1007675)

    I'm sure it will spare someone from being asked why the variables have racist connotations when people too young to remember IDE drives want to contribute.