While technical accuracy and precedent are valid reasons to remove master/slave terminology from a codebase, they are of course not the only reason. In addition to specific terminology updates in specific projects, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) published a memo in 2018 acknowledging and outlining the problem and offering specific alternatives to both master/slave and blacklist/whitelist terminology. Although complaints about master/slave terminology circulated at least as far back as the 1990s, the first large mainstream American exposure came from Los Angeles in 2003, where a black employee of the county filed a complaint concerning master/slave labels on videotape devices.
OPENZFS VS MACZFS UPDATE
Similar historical updatesĪs mentioned previously, OpenZFS is by no means the first project to update its codebase and documentation to remove references to slavery. The different replacement terms exist because the real functions are different-and the replacement for the original terminology is therefore more descriptive of what's actually happening underneath the hood. For Drupal, the replacement is primary/replica, and for Redis, it's leader/follower. Advertisementįor the BIND DNS server, the Internet Systems Consortium replaced master/slave with primary/secondary. That's because the actual relationship described is different in each project, and so the most sensible replacement for the same original term is different for each project. It is particularly telling that, although all three projects used the same original "master/slave" terms, the replacements were different. Some notable projects that have discarded and replaced master/slave terminology include the BIND DNS server, Drupal Web application framework, and Redis datastore. OpenZFS is not on the leading edge of this disambiguation effort. Replacing "master/slave" terminology generally results in a more precise, easily discoverable technical description. For those who refuse to think of anything but clarity, there is no good descriptive relationship between any technology and human slavery-and the human term far predates any engineering or technical use. There are several valid answers to the "Why patch?" question. Updating terminology is technically sound 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.
OPENZFS VS MACZFS PATCH
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).īut this being the Internet, unfortunately, outraged naysayers descended on the pull request, and the comments were quickly closed to non-contributors. 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."
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