Re: I'm surprised to see the word master here

Stephen Frost <[email protected]> Wed, 9 Oct 2019 12:51:16 -0400
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.db.postgresql.devel.documentation
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Greetings,

* Peter Eisentraut ([email protected]) wrote:
> On 2019-10-08 18:39, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > I'm also at a loss as to why we're discussing what to call 'master/
> > master' here since we don't actually use the term 'master/master' in our
> > docs at all today that I can see.
> 
> The underlying premise appears to be that the word should be banned.  In
> which case that would certainly propagate to the web site, the wiki,
> other nearby resources, some of which certainly do use that term
> liberally in various configurations.  So we should think that through
> regardless.

Saying 'banned' goes beyond what I think the goal here is- but, yes, I
believe the premise here is that we should avoid using the term.  That's
only part of it though- we should also be trying to actually be consistent
in our use of terms and we're far from that today.  Fixing the consistency
issue would just about entirely remove the term by itself, to the point
where adjusting the remaining one page in the docs is a modest change
that also puts us in a better light.

Regarding taking that avoidance to other places- I believe it's pretty
clear that we have not implemented any kind of ban even for other words
which we now avoid using on postgresql.org and in the docs- a search for
'slave' on the wiki turns up a pretty impressive number of hits, so I
don't know why we're thinking of expanding this to include that as we
haven't before.  Perhaps we should consider that, but that's an entirely
different discussion and not relevant to this discussion.  Additionally,
the wiki is pretty clearly a user resource and nothing on it should be
considered an endorsement from the project- which is part of the reason
we moved things like policies from the wiki over to the main website.

Reviewing the website, beyond the docs, turns up almost zero references
to 'master' or 'multi-master' or even 'remastering'- and the ones that
do exist appear to all be from older press releases which I don't think
anyone would reasonably expect us to change at this point (though I do
wonder if perhaps we should start to clean up "presskit91" and
friends...).  We do have "Mastering PostgreSQL", as a reference to the
book of the same name, but I don't believe anyone has an issue with
that.  Saying that these terms are in use liberally on the main website
just doesn't stand up to any scrutiny or even cursory review, from what
I can see, and if we aren't using them in the docs, it seems extremely
unlikely that they'd end up getting added to the main website.

If there are other resources which you have specific concerns regarding,
I'd suggest you go look and see to what extent they're actually using
the terminology in question and then we can discuss them and how much
they are viewed as representing the project.

Thanks,

Stephen
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