Re: blacklist -> blocklist in current

[Mayuresh <mayuresh%acm.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 03:44:22PM -0400, Christos Zoulas wrote:
> We should be all doing whatever we can to correct social/race/gender/sex
> injustices/prejudices around us, and every little bit helps.

I am a great fan of bla^Hocklistd and I'd be happily using it even if you
name it say timbuktud.

But I think we are stretching above argument a bit too far. By any stretch
of imagination I couldn't find any trace of racist link in a very commonly
used word in Comp Sc like blacklist. Even tried searching its origin[1]
and doesn't look like it has anything to do with any race.

Just a quick grep in an arbitrary snapshot of the source tree of NetBSD
shows the word 'black' appearing at 4146 places...

There are `blackholes', `blackballs', `blacklist' (other than in
bla^Hocklistd's code), blackfin (of course some like this are not names
chosen by NetBSD but of 3rd party hardware, such as a processor or a
company name), `black magic', `blackjack', `blackboard', `blackbook',
`blackbox', `blackcrow', `blackberry', `black cathedral', `black
helicopter', `black tree' ...

And I am done only with 6% of the grep output.

Mayuresh

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting