Terminology Updates in Foreman

Blog
#1

Over a week ago, @lzap published an RFC about removing the term blacklist from Foreman templates. A short discussion about this took place on the related Pull Request. With a wider discussion taking place in the tech, open source, and academic worlds (please see Further Information at the bottom of this post for some links), the community management team wants to take a moment to outline our thoughts on this in the context of the Foreman community. While normally RFCs and PRs go through a longer process, we think it is important to address this specific RFC and outline some action items.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://theforeman.org/2020/06/terminology-updates-in-foreman.html
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#2

This issue goes back many years, and I am glad more people are addressing it. However I think you are sending out he wrong message with
“However, when certain terminology that seems harmless is highlighted as exclusionary, bigoted, and a vestige of societal legacies that are oppressive, as much as we would like to remain neutral on politics, inaction on language like this can imply an attitude or stance that is not a reflection of our community members and is not in line with our community guidelines.”
…that makes people become extremely defensive often to the point they will go out of there way to use the terminology as an reaction/response, it is also highly offense an unfair to them.

The reason we should change words is because of a cultural sensitivity which some people understandably find uncomfortable to use or hear, and given the “bigger picture” (which has existed for many years), it is a small price worth paying.

Let us change terminology because we are nice and considerate to others.

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#3

Hello and welcome to the community!
Thanks for your feedback.
This paragraph was addressing a legacy stance held by this community to avoid political issues as much as is possible. It wasn’t a boilerplate text but written to address issues that arose and led to the community team having to address this. I hope that makes sense. Overall, we want to be nice and focus on technical topics around Foreman :slight_smile:

#4

One example where we use master/slave is our nic bonding because that’s the terminology used for bonding. Network Teaming is an an alternative solution to bonding which has technical benefits as well. Feature #17033: Add Network Teaming configuration for hosts - Foreman is open for over 3 years even though Network Teaming is the recommended solution since RHEL 7. There is a comparison and the lower performance overhead compared to bonding alone makes it a feature we should support.

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#5

There are some updates in regards to the Linux kernel:

The new terminology is now recommended, however nothing is being replaced in the current codebase:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=49decddd39e5f6132ccd7d9fdc3d7c470b0061bb

If there are userspace alternatives introduced we can proceed with changing our templates, that’s not happening right now.

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