Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel | Hacker News Reader

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel

theregister.com

23 pointsAlupis25 comments

See the lively discussion from about a day ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23810780

Also discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23819763

It's a pity there's no duplicate article button so that mods can be alerted to mark articles as such or merge the discussion.

> Blacklists are to become either “denylists” or “blocklists” and whitelists will become “allowlists” or “passlists”.

I'm glad they chose allow/denylist instead of another often proposed redlist/greenlist. From a language learning point of view it's much more clear than having to figure out the local customs on how colors map to concepts. (e.g. a red market in asia = stocks went up, green = stocks went down)

I mean on the one hand stoplights are pretty universal. On the other hand, redlist just pushes the "race issue" from one race onto another.

Not really on the race issue. The difference is that "black" is an accepted, common term for people with noticeable sub-Saharan African ancestry (or who identify as such). So using the same term to essentially mean "bad" is problematic.

"Red" is no longer common at all for referring to Native Americans (even less so as of this week thanks to getting rid of the name Redskins), and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who identifies as a "red person."

Also, red in this usage would entail more of a stretch to consider that it means "bad." It just means "stop," which is far more neutral.

I'm guessing you don't live near an Indian reservation and have no idea what you're talking about. I hear the term "red man" probably a couple times a month.

Also: see the Washington Redskins

I'm fine with his choices, but the meaning of red and green as stop and go has become quite universal. Is there anywhere in the world that doesn't have traffic lights? (ok, anywhere in the world that you'd be likely to see a linux device)

I see it regularly extended to such things as "accept" vs "decline" on phone screens when a call comes in.

Applying those colors to stock market charts is not a particularly natural extension of the concept, though. Although I'd pick green as "up", still, it isn't as direct as something like allow/pass or deny/block. Those fall well into red light / green light territory to me.

Maybe not directly related but some traffic lights in japan are more what we'd call blue than green https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/515205/why-does-japan-ha...

At the end of the day why bother with another quirky cultural color-meaning-pair when there's something so literal available? I want to avoid re-learning terms when we meet aliens who happen to perceive colors in our visible spectrum ;)

Of course, for a Japanese person coding in English that's the least of their problems....

I'll admit the benefits of color-coding things are less if you are using words as opposed to actual colors, but I still think an argument could be made for using green and red, since deny/block and allow/pass seem a bit too closely tied to a specific expected action. I could imagine uses of the terms in the future (not necessarily in linux code) where those descriptors don't quite work, but where the colors names communicate the concept in a more general way.

It reminds me of the issue with the idea of calling black people "African Americans." It wasn't all that well thought through, because it is overly specific and doesn't work for, say, a black person who never lived in America.

I'm a native english speaker but trying to learn other languages (and speaking with english learners) has given me a new appreciation for simplicity for ease of learning. For something which wants to be the lingua franca of the world I think this is a desirable attribute. And given few things are universal across existing cultures, it doesn't leave much room for metaphor.

The whole term of African-American is indeed a confusing mess, for reasons you pointed out, but also that a straightforward interpretation might mean that Elon Musk (being South African) should fall under that umbrella, but to suggest so would land you in some hot water. I would hate to have to explain this nuance constantly to non-native speakers.

Bhutan doesn't have any traffic lights. They tried one out briefly, but the people didn't like it. They do have some programmers, probably more than a few Linux installations. Not sure if they have any Linux developers, but it wouldn't be incredibly surprising if they had a couple.

It doesn't surprise me that someone would come up with a counterexample. :)

I believe he said that those terms should be avoided, if possible, for new systems, but that they remain perfectly OK to use with old existing APIs.

So what a misleading clickbait title.

Like in real life - slavery isn't really banished, it's transformed into a less brittle, and perhaps more insidious, social relationship: Former bound slaves are now employed as salaried servants, free to leave at any time. Except if they want to earn enough to feed their families, that is.

So now, we still have masters and servants in the kernels, but the names are changed:

> In their place coders will be expected to use alternatives

> such as “primary” and “secondary” relationships, or refer

> to “leaders” and “followers”, or even “directors” and

> “performers”.

If it's _actually_ primary foo's and secondary foo's, then fine; but I suspect these are just euphemisms. Now, in software, the effect is just a bit of obfuscation. What's annoying is the reflection of the real-life trade not to call a spade a spade.

PS - I'm fine with changes like "denylists" instead of "blacklists".

We're only allowed to make superficial changes to the culture, anything that would change the fundamental power structure of wealthy people controlling armies of labor without any accountability is verboten.

These cosmetic changes are good, but they are like sucralose, sating the public's immediate desire for change without providing any calories.

It's like the discourse around statutes. Bringing down statutes is substituting for the actual change that was routed by power's refusal to actually defund the police. In the context of a revolution, bringing down a statue is a powerful statement. In the context of not-a-revolution, bringing down a statue is like rearranging furniture to make a room less garish and more tasteful.

Reading this book "Democracy Inc." rn on "managed democracy" and "inverted totalitarianism": https://www.truthdig.com/articles/sheldon-wolin-and-inverted...

> Former bound slaves are now employed as salaried servants, free to leave at any time. Except if they want to earn enough to feed their families, that is.

I mean, I certainly have "issues" with the system we have, but at least most people get to choose their 'master' these days?

(Assumption being that there are multiple competing employers vying for the opportunity to employ 'servants'. Of course, if all 'masters' are equally shitty, the choice doesn't matter, but...)

Concentration of capital is such that choice is effectively limited.

This is particularly striking in a place like, say, South Africa (even though there it's post-Apartheid, not post-Slavery): Nearly all of the land and the large industrial and commercial enterprises are owned by white people. So, the black person who now has full political rights can choose which white proprietor to sell his labor power to.

It depends a lot on where you live. It's not that bad where I live (EU, specifically Scandinavia), for example. Of course it goes without saying that we're generally quite privileged compared to a lot of the rest of the world.

Anyway, my point was really just that at least there is a choice of "the least bad" rather than no choice at all. I realize that that may not amount to much.

I believe you, but at the same time all countries have to go through the phases of development (and sometime regressions, like what's going on right now in the world) to get to better lives for people.

so what are your suggestions then?

Call things what they are. If one entity gives orders to other entities and they must carry them out, then don't call these the "primary" and the "secondary" entities, because then you've given them a vague and non-descriptive name. I'm not saying you _have_ to use "master" and "slave" when there are other reasonably descriptive names, just don't avoid it artificially because it reminds you of bad things.

again... what are your suggestions then? that whole response was not "calling things what they are", it deflecting from actually answering the question. if you don't have good idea of the terms to use, you can just say that you don't know.

I liked the old linus better.

An excerpt from the coding-style.rst:

> Exceptions for introducing new usage is to maintain a userspace ABI/API, or when updating code for an existing (as of 2020) hardware or protocol specification that mandates those terms.

You know that Linus is "drawing the line somewhere" and he is only banning this for new usages. The PC crowd may still question why not remove "all" usages including old code with these "offensive" terms. (It's really isn't realistic for the Linux Kernel.)

You're more than welcome to recommend to remove all usages including historical ones to Linus. /s

>The PC crowd may still question why not remove "all" usages

Wouldn't that be a valid question from any curious person?

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