On Fri, 21 Sep 2018 at 17:10, Nico Williams <nico@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 12:51:18PM +0100, Dave Cridland wrote:
> Back when I was even more clueless than I am today, and actually ran DNS
> servers, we used the terms "primary" and "secondary" as a matter of course.
> Secondaries copied the data from primaries.
>
> So far, so good.
>
> Then we added a third nameserver, and of course that must be the tertiary,
> used only when *both* the primary and secondary had failed.
>
> When I realised my stupidity, I avoided the terms "primary" and "secondary"
> in the workplace, and instead used the terms "master" and "slave", which
> were less easily confused - or rather, made me less easily confused by
> them. The fact that "master/slave" was well understood within engineering
> helped enormously.
I use master/replica or primary/replica (in case anyone takes offense at
"master" even in a context in which "slave" does not appear).
"master" and "replica" seem fine to me.
> "Blacklist" and "whitelist" are well-known terms, but they can be avoided
> with small effort to provide synonyms which are more easily understood -
Do these terms have racial etymologies, or is a racial tinge being
inferred where there has been none?
Consider that English is my third language. Why would I know the answer
to this question? A brief search seems to indicate that their origins
are not racial, but perhaps I'm wrong. E.g.,
http://garysaid.com/are-the-terms-whitelist-and-blacklist-racist/
Note that using other colors could still give rise to objections.
Yeah, the etymology is not racist. Most cultures - possibly all cultures - associate white with light and goodness, and black with darkness and evil.
Other connotations are different, mind - black is associated with death, authority, and so on in Europe, whereas white gets death in Asia (and, I think, Australia)..
> "Blocklist" and "Permitlist" are trivial examples here. But if someone says
> "There is a whitelist", then I also know the default is to deny. So we'll
> need to be a bit more explicit about the default state, perhaps. In other
> words, I worry about changing these terms, but the possibility for
> confusion is low if we do.
Blacklisting is a bad idea in most cases anyways. A whitelist in a
world without a blacklist shouldn't have racial tinge imputed, right?
While there's no etymological basis for whitelist and blacklist being racist, I can understand why it's not a connotation we want to use if possible.
Dave.
