On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 02:30:34PM -0600, Kevin Lund wrote: > In accordance with the growing trend (references below) toward > inclusive language in code, I'd like to request that portions of the > hostap codebase be refactored to migrate to more inclusive > terminology. For example, the term "blacklist" is used multiple times > in the wpa_supplicant codebase, and I'd suggest changing to more > inclusive terms like "denylist" or "ignorelist". Would the hostap > maintainers (Jouni) be receptive to CLs which implement such changes? In general, yes, this type of changes would be welcome. I went through an initial review of the terminology used within hostap.git in June before my vacation and replaced couple of cases in documentation. The "blacklist" term was the main item that needed more planning due to a significantly larger impact due to both the number of instances and especially exposure through external interfaces. Changes that are fully internal to the implementation or documentation and do not have pending work on them can be done easily whenever such items are identified and patches are proposed. > These changes would involve changing some code in place, for instance > the wpa_blacklist from > https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/tree/wpa_supplicant/blacklist.h could simply > be renamed to wpa_ignorelist (which in my opinion is more descriptive > of the list's purpose anyway). Some external facing bits such as > wpa_cli commands "blacklist" and "blacklist clear" and the network > configuration field "bssid_blacklist" would need to be deprecated and > replaced. hostapd uses accept/deny lists as the term for MAC address -based access control. The wpa_supplicant/blacklist.c implementation started as a temporary restriction on which APs to skip due to a failure to connect so that other APs in the network can be tried first. That has been extended to cover some more functionality over years and there are pending proposals to extend it further. Regardless, "wpa_ignorelist" or maybe more descriptively "struct wpa_ignore_bss" should be fine as the implementation-internal name for this. The "BLACKLIST <params>" control interface command is exposed to external components and it would need to be maintained for backwards compatibility, but it could be left as an alias name for a new command that matches the new name of the functionality. It should also be noted that there are couple of pending patches touching wpa_supplicant/blacklist.c. Those would obviously have significant conflicts with any patches renaming the file or replacing language within it. It might make more sense to make sure any such known pending work is applied first to avoid conflicts. In particular, this pending patch series would be impacted: http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/hostap/list/?series=182857 The wpa_supplicant network profile configuration parameters "bssid_blacklist" and "bssid_whitelist" are similarly exposed to external components and would need to be maintained for backwards compatibility for parsing existing configuration files or configuration commands over the control interface. New names like "bssid_accept" and "bssid_deny" (matching the hostapd MAC ACL language) could be used as the replacement for this, though, as the main implementation. -- Jouni Malinen PGP id EFC895FA _______________________________________________ Hostap mailing list Hostap@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/hostap
