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When is Linux going to rename “man” which according to my employer is a non-inclusive word and flagged in pull requests
by socalgal2 1y ago
When is Linux going to rename “man” which according to my employer is a non-inclusive word and flagged in pull requests
- johnisgood 1y agoYeah, or killing parents and children. sighs. People really need some context-awareness.
- gritten 1y agoWhat...?
- patates 1y agoI think they mean the kill/pkill. Not defending the silly chain of what-about arguments though.
- boxed 1y agoIs it silly though? With enough linguistic archeology I bet you can make this entire comment I'm writing right now extremely problematic and offensive. The linguistic treadmill means exactly that older terms change meaning back in time. They also change meaning FORWARD in time, meaning your inoffensive terms today will almost certainly be offensive in the future. It's also the case that offense is language dependent, which is always funny when Americans hard ban certain words on chats and then Swedes can't use the Swedish word for "end" because it's spelled like a slur in English. Everyone needs to stop this nonsense.
- Y-bar 1y ago> Swedes can't use the Swedish word for "end" because it's spelled like a slur "Ände" is a slur? (excuse my lack of transductional skills)
- optionalsquid 1y agoThey probably mean "slut". The word has the same meaning in Danish, by the way
- johnisgood 1y agoThe whole terminology in IT could be turned upside down because it can be quite offensive if people ignore the context, so it is not limited to processes. There are utilities like "man", "finger", etc. that could come across as offensive too, to some, with no context-awareness. Today it is "master" -> "main", tomorrow the whole IT terminology. There are many PRs on GitHub with regarding to these, by the way. ... also what about pins? Slave and master pins! Must be about slavery, right? No, it is not, not at all. In any case, who made the association of the git branch "master" to slavery? It is absurd. People need to take the context into account.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoIMO for something to be offensive it has to have intention to be offensive. Otherwise it's misunderstanding.
- johnisgood 1y agoOf course, but they do not care about that. They made the association, and now they are being vocal about it. I am pretty sure most of us never made this association or attribution. I have never thought about slavery until they told me their own associations to it. I am pretty sure master / slave pins were not intended to be offensive, nor attributed to slavery. Similarly with the git "master" branch.
- johnisgood 1y agoAnd quite frankly, the problem is that we cater to such people instead of teaching them to be context-aware.
- optionalsquid 1y ago> In any case, who made the association of the git branch "master" to slavery? It is absurd. BitKeeper, the VCS that preceded Git, used the terminology "master" and "slaves", so the association is not based on nothing: https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/0524ffb3f6f15ae8d3922b28da581f334475fe61/doc/HOWTO.ask#L223 https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/0524ffb3f6f1...
- rich_sasha 1y agoDon't forget killing orphans and zombies.
- johnisgood 1y agoI will not forget master and slave pins either. :D
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- veeti 1y agoHas the Linux community thought through the implications of using words like "containerization", when millions of slaves are still shipped around in shipping containers [1]? Docker is problematic technology to say the least. [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/1/26/slavery-in-libya-life-inside-a-container https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/1/26/slavery-in-libya-li...
- johnisgood 1y agoYes, we ought to change "containerization" everywhere! In the Linux kernel, user-space, Docker, everywhere, only because people have difficulties with context-awareness! /s :D Please IT people, tell me that this thing is absurd.
- veeti 1y agoFreeBSD also ought to consider the trauma "jails" as an analogy can cause to those unfairly incarcerated by the U.S. justice system.
- johnisgood 1y agoNow we are getting somewhere! :D
- rurp 1y agoWe better get rid of database constraints at the same time, since people were constrained on those same ships. I don't see how we can move forward as an industry until these grievous harms have been addressed.
- mock-possum 1y agokillAllChildrenOf() is still my favorite method name
- ModernMech 1y agoSide note, I had a professor who used to talk about "forking children" (processes) and I mean... the way she said it, with her accent... there are better words we could be using here to mean the same thing that wouldn't cause such absurdities to be uttered.
- johnisgood 11mo agoNah, I think the terminology is fine. Everyone in IT understands it. The people outside of IT have no business in our terminology.
- jayd16 1y agoIt costs nothing and makes people happy so why be a jerk about it?
- mirekrusin 1y agoIt’s non inclusive of people who think it’s stupid - their feelings are not taken under account.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoIf there was a case where that was more than a quantum of annoyance, where it actually was any kind of actual weight at all, maybe those incredibly small feelings might be interesting to weigh. But they're not. They're the smallest of feelings, weighing nothing. Making this change is the easiest lightest most obviously acceptable of wins.
- bakugo 1y agoThis is such a weirdly patronizing comment. What exactly makes the feelings of the people who cried about the original name "bigger" than those of the people who don't like the change?
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoMaster can conjure a horrible past. That's a real actual hazard. Avoiding it should be easy. It should be the easiest of easy things. Make the change and move on. Hack your reality, improve things, don't make more of a glaring ugly mess of things than need be. It costs so so little to do a small good act. You wouldn't name your primary branch holocaust or tyrant or oppressor or doommaker or worldruiner or hates[ethnicity]. But computing used master/slave extensively for decades (ex: I2C, IDE protocols). Folks arguing that it hurts their feelings to not have those names wouldn't be given any weight. These are alligator tears. No one has made a case that "main" is a bad name. Because this isn't a real case. It's perfectly clear, no lesser a name in any way. More broadly, when assessing positive liberty (freedom to do something) versus negative liberty (freedom from being dogged), we shouldn't favor positive liberty to make broadly harmful defaults that can hurt people and/or bring misery over negative liberty not have a world a rare couple antagonists insist on driving down in stature. This feels to me like people either dragging their feet & bringing resistance, or, on many many cases, people actively obstructing, making an easy simple improvement much much more fraught & hard. And many of those people I feel like do it because they know it is a good change, and they actively seek to keep the world worse. I have little and descendingly less pity for any. If someone wants to build a case for why their feelings here that we shouldn't do this have weight, I'm all ears. And I'll spend some time to read more comments to see what I see. But the person I replied to made zero case for why they felt their emotional injury (as they begged for tolerance of intolerance), yet felt that their case should carry as much or more weight, where-as master/slave usage in computing are words which associates with slavery. Which is the ultimate positive liberty vs negative liberty case, which reflects the matter here: the negative liberty to not be enslaved outweighs any positive liberty to enslave. You're free to think it's stupid!! That fact though just doesn't matter very much in this case. It doesn't actually really affect you. You can adapt, with barely more than zero cost. It's stupid maybe perhaps possibly!! But of no cost. And that's the weight of your feelings here: it's not actually of any consequence to you, you are claiming stake in a matter without any basis. You're free to feel however you like in this world, but whether those emotions actually match/reflect the circumstances that spring them matters. Generally I think most people kind of agree that it sucks that master/slave (ex: i2c, IDE protocols) nomenclature was chosen & used in computing, and calling the shift away stupid-in my view- should be taken as the smallest imaginable quantum of protest, the smallest tears imaginable. Stop stopping the world, let time progress forward, don't trap us in your negative energy forever.
- stephen_g 1y agoGit (and computer science) shouldn’t use ‘hash’ either since it’s a drug reference.
- 7bit 1y agoSo a hashtable is basically the drug dealers menu?
- croon 1y agoCuriously "man" is etymologically gender neutral, where wo/wif(man) denoted the female prefix for man, and the male dropped what would otherwise be were(man), seen in for example werewolf, which is gendered.
- throw-the-towel 1y agoSo a female werewolf would be a wowulf then? Cool!
- croon 1y agoThere is discussion on whether wer/e usage in werewolf has further/other roots, but assuming consensus landing on my GP, then yes!
- nacozarina 1y agowodude
- binary132 1y agoso you’re saying a woman is just a female man? that’s crazy, dude…
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoYes, "man" is etymologically a person, "woman" is a female person, and "wereman" is a male person. Over time "were" got dropped, but "wo" got kept, so "man" is either a gender-neutral person or a male person, distinguished based on context. E.g. "mankind" is gender-neutral.
- curtisblaine 1y agoDon't give them ideas