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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

OpenZFS removed offensive terminology from its code [arstechnica.com]

On Wednesday evening, ZFS founding developer Matthew Ahrens submitted what should have been a simple, non-controversial pull request [github.com] 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 [die.net] 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 [reddit.com] 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 [soylentnews.org]

Original Submission