Replace oppressive terms with inclusive terms.

[Sam Kuper]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 09:04:36AM +0200, Daniel Golle wrote:
> Please take a look at the patch series posted for hostap:
> 
> https://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/hostap/2021-June/039653.html
> 
> I think most of these are very good examples of linguistical
> **improvements** [...]

This sort of thing, while well-intentioned, *will* increase engineering
overhead.

Want to search the Git log for diffs or commit messages mentioning
X-in-the-middle attacks?

**Before the change:**  one would only need to search case-insensitively
for the expanded and unexpanded initialisms of the term that was
industry-standard for decades, e.g.

    '(m\.? ?i\.?  ?t\.?  ?m|man.in.the.middle)'

**After the change:**  good luck to you!  If you forget (or never knew)
that MITM was changed to PITM, etc, and just search as above, then
you'll get false negatives.  This could lead to bugs.

Alternatively, if you remember that it MITM was changed but can't recall
what it was changed *to* (maybe you're not a native English speaker -
either way, you might ask yourself, in a moment of pressure, "Was it
'Human In The Middle'?  'Being In The Middle'?"), then you'll need to
run a more elaborate search to try to find the target term, and might
still fail:

    '((m|h|b)\.? ?i\.?  ?t\.?  ?m|((hu)?man|being).in.the.middle)'

Again, false negatives could lead to bugs.



If OpenWRT *does* adopt changes like this - and I'm not picking a side -
it should be done very carefully and with an eye to maintainability.

Standardized commit messages for all such changes.  Plus an easy-to-find
lookup table in a suitable repo, to help devs translate between oldspeak
and newspeak.  That sort of thing.

-- 
A: When it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: When is top-posting a bad thing?

()  ASCII ribbon campaign. Please avoid HTML emails & proprietary
/\  file formats. (Why? See e.g. https://v.gd/jrmGbS ). Thank you.