RFC: Conscious language in the Binutils

[Andrew Pinski]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 3:53 AM Nick Clifton via Binutils
<binutils@sourceware.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Guys,
>
>   [I am writing this email with my Red Hat on, rather than my FSF hat].
>
>   Inside Red Hat there is an initiative to address some of the language
>   used in open source projects, making it more inclusive:
>
> https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/making-open-source-more-inclusive-eradicating-problematic-language
>
>   This includes addressing terms used in source code, as well as
>   documentation and so on.  I would like to offer to make such changes
>   to the binutils sources.  (See for example the attached patch which
>   addresses uses of blacklist/whitelist and master/slave).  These
>   changes would only cover source code maintained by the GNU Binutils
>   project itself.  Imported sources, eg libiberty, config and zlib,
>   would not be changed unless these changes happen upstream first.
>
>   Before making any alterations however I wanted to see if there were
>   any comments, concerns or issues regarding this proposal.  Does anyone
>   have anything that they wish to say ?

I know I am way late in responding to this.  I agree we should change
the language usage.

Looking through the patch, there are more changes needed than just
simple language changes needed; These places should change even
without a change to language usage of master really, e.g. what is the
difference between main/master and primary?

There are other cases where master usage should be primary instead of
main due to usage of secondary later on. e.g.
-  0 \(indirect line string, offset: 0x.*\): master directory
+  0 \(indirect line string, offset: 0x.*\): main directory
   1 \(indirect line string, offset: 0x.*\): secondary directory

There was also a thread on the glibc list (and I think went to the
POSIX list in the end) about how to handle master/slave in some cases;
it was dealing with PTYs IIRC which could be used as a template of
what master/slave could be changed to.  I have not looked into the
full details on those suggestions.

The rest of the changes which changes/remove master looks decent and needed.

Thanks,
Andrew Pinski

>
> Cheers
>   Nick
>