On Tue, Jun 15 2021, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > On Tue, 15 Jun 2021, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: > >> I suggested in [1] that the "alice" and "bob" examples in our >> documentation would be better written without a reference to such >> fictional characters, for reasons that have nothing to do with trying >> to bend over backwards to avoid any reference to people's gender. It >> just makes for better documentation. > > no, it doesn't ... and wikipedia explains it nicely: It doesn't make for better documentation? Maybe not, but can you comment on specific parts of the changes in this series that make it worse? > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob > > "In cryptography, Alice and Bob are fictional characters commonly used > as placeholders in discussions about cryptographic protocols or > systems, and in other science and engineering literature where there > are several participants in a thought experiment. The Alice and Bob > characters were invented by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard > Adleman in their 1978 paper "A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures > and Public-key Cryptosystems".[1] Subsequently, they have become > common archetypes in many scientific and engineering fields, such as > quantum cryptography, game theory and physics.[2] As the use of Alice > and Bob became more widespread, additional characters were added, > sometimes each with a particular meaning. These characters do not have > to refer to humans; they refer to generic agents which might be > different computers or even different programs running on a single > computer." > > if you want to make the docs better, have at it, but please don't do > something as meaningless as replacing "bob" and "alice" because you're > feeling politically correct, or woke, or whatever the hell the kids > call it these days. > > jesus ... I believe that the commit message of 1/6 addresses the point you're raising here: http://lore.kernel.org/git/patch-1.6-abbb5b9ba13-20210615T161330Z-avarab@xxxxxxxxx
