Inclusive language request

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 02:30:34PM -0600, Kevin Lund wrote:
> In accordance with the growing trend (references below) toward
> inclusive language in code, I'd like to request that portions of the
> hostap codebase be refactored to migrate to more inclusive
> terminology. For example, the term "blacklist" is used multiple times
> in the wpa_supplicant codebase, and I'd suggest changing to more
> inclusive terms like "denylist" or "ignorelist". Would the hostap
> maintainers (Jouni) be receptive to CLs which implement such changes?

In general, yes, this type of changes would be welcome. I went through
an initial review of the terminology used within hostap.git in June
before my vacation and replaced couple of cases in documentation. The
"blacklist" term was the main item that needed more planning due to a
significantly larger impact due to both the number of instances and
especially exposure through external interfaces. Changes that are fully
internal to the implementation or documentation and do not have pending
work on them can be done easily whenever such items are identified and
patches are proposed.

> These changes would involve changing some code in place, for instance
> the wpa_blacklist from
> https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/tree/wpa_supplicant/blacklist.h could simply
> be renamed to wpa_ignorelist (which in my opinion is more descriptive
> of the list's purpose anyway). Some external facing bits such as
> wpa_cli commands "blacklist" and "blacklist clear" and the network
> configuration field "bssid_blacklist" would need to be deprecated and
> replaced.

hostapd uses accept/deny lists as the term for MAC address -based access
control. The wpa_supplicant/blacklist.c implementation started as a
temporary restriction on which APs to skip due to a failure to connect
so that other APs in the network can be tried first. That has been
extended to cover some more functionality over years and there are
pending proposals to extend it further. Regardless, "wpa_ignorelist" or
maybe more descriptively "struct wpa_ignore_bss" should be fine as the
implementation-internal name for this. The "BLACKLIST <params>" control
interface command is exposed to external components and it would need to
be maintained for backwards compatibility, but it could be left as an
alias name for a new command that matches the new name of the
functionality.

It should also be noted that there are couple of pending patches
touching wpa_supplicant/blacklist.c. Those would obviously have
significant conflicts with any patches renaming the file or replacing
language within it. It might make more sense to make sure any such known
pending work is applied first to avoid conflicts. In particular, this
pending patch series would be impacted:
http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/hostap/list/?series=182857

The wpa_supplicant network profile configuration parameters
"bssid_blacklist" and "bssid_whitelist" are similarly exposed to
external components and would need to be maintained for backwards
compatibility for parsing existing configuration files or configuration
commands over the control interface. New names like "bssid_accept" and
"bssid_deny" (matching the hostapd MAC ACL language) could be used as
the replacement for this, though, as the main implementation.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA