On Thu, 2019-04-25 at 11:46 +1000, Michael Gratton wrote: > Hi all, > > I'd like to formally propose as a GNOME Goal that GNOME modules > replace > references to the terms "master" and "slave". This is a worthwhile > thing to do for social inclusiveness[0]. Many FOSS and non-FOSS > projects, including Django[1], Python[2], and Rust[3] and the > ISC[4]) > have already implemented similar programmes and it would be good for > GNOME to do so also. The scope would be to replace occurrences of > the > terms appearing in the user interface, web sites, documentation, > APIs > (except as deprecated symbols), and git repositories - essentially > wherever a person using or developing software for GNOME may > reasonably > encounter them. > > By way of background, I recently did just this for Geary[5] after a > request via private communication. The work was essentially trivial, > and it has been a relatively painless transition. A number of people > have positively commented on the change, and no one has objected to > the > UI or API changes, however some feedback has been received about > renaming the mainline branch, broadly falling into essentially three > categories: 1) It doesn't matter, 2) it's inconvenient, and 3) it > should be done project-wide, not piecemeal. > > To respond to that feedback, which I imagine will also be raised for > this proposal, I'd suggest that (1) is clearly not the case - yes it > doesn't matter to many people, but it does matter to some, and > that's > the whole point of making a project more socially inclusive - to > make > it better for everyone. The issue raised by (2) is not a new problem > - > we already have to remember project names, branch names, file names, > symbol names, and so on. To make that easier we have tooling support > (auto-completion in both GUIs and TUIs, the ability to set things as > defaults, code symbol lookup, etc.). Further, disruption can be > minimised by carefully choosing replacement names. I deliberately > chose > "mainline" for Geary's mainline branch name because it has the same > auto-complete prefix as "master", for example. Want to check out the > mainline branch? Just type "git co m<TAB>", just like you always > have. > Lastly, if adopted project-wide, then we'd all get used to the new > names rather quicky. Finally, to respond to (3) I am proposing it > project-wide now. > > To summarise, let's replace the use of these deprecated terms in our > project as a step towards making GNOME a project that everyone wants > to > use and develop for. Who's in?
This email was really difficult to read because of the layout of the proposal, and how the response to feedback was formatted. I had to scan it 3 times to find what you wanted to rename the main git branches. +1 on the sysadmins doing the git changes project-wide +1 on tracking master/slave usage project-wide and removing it What your proposal doesn't touch on is what to do when the master/slave usage is out of our control, and legacy, especially when it comes to hardware. I feel that it would be better to not touch those, and come up with a statement that could be used in documentation to explain their usage. Cheers _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
