1642790 - (remove-blackwhitelist) [meta] Remove ALL references of blacklist/whitelist within Gecko

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Jonathan Kingston [:jkt] he/him]

It's widely accepted that black and whitelist is outdated and Edge reportedly has removed it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/a-z-word-list-term-collections/b/blacklist

There are many other examples too like https://whatwg.org/style-guide#tone

There have been many attempts to follow suit in Firefox codebase and it now feels time to remove all the remainder.

This is a meta bug to find, remove and prevent all further references to this use of language.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Sylvestre, is there an appropriate linter that we could use to enforce this?

Comment 2

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

We could write a new mozlint checker for this. It would require parsing all files.
Or maybe just call ripgrep {blacklist, whitelist} to make it super fast.

Anyway, short answer, we can do it.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kingston [:jkt] he/him]

Gijs, I remember discussing the commit hook in Austin for this; thanks for bringing it up!
I raised Bug 1642825 for the hook/lint.

Comment 4

[Jon Bauman [:jbauman:]]

Thank you, Jonathan, for filing this!

Though somewhat less well-known, "grandfather" (only the verb form, referring to the grandfather clause) has its origins in racist voter suppression. Since there are a good number of uses in our codebase, could we add removing that to this bug as well? If used in a different sense (i.e., a node's grandfather in a data structure), I think that's not racially insensitive, though we might want to remove unnecessarily gendered language and change it to grandparent.

Some resources:

1. The Racial History Of The 'Grandfather Clause'
2. Words Matter: Why We Should Put an End to “Grandfathering”

Comment 5

[Anne (:annevk)]

(For tree structures I would recommend we follow https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#trees to the extent we don't do so already.)

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Jon Bauman [:jbauman:] from comment #4)

Since there are a good number of uses in our codebase, could we add removing that to this bug as well?

Please file a separate bug, in order to keep discussions focused - unfortunately there are way more whitelist/blacklist instances and so this bug is going to be big enough on its own. You can add it to the "see also" field, or file a meta-meta bug if you think there are likely other terms whose use should be reconsidered.

Comment 7

[Jon Bauman [:jbauman:]]

Thanks, Gijs. I've filed bug 1643142 and would appreciate anyone's input over there.

Comment 8

[Darkspirit]

While grandfathering is a (rather young) historic US-american word that should be replaced, I would like to point out that avoiding the terms black and white for their actual meaning further cements dividing language regarding humans: https://twitter.com/Jan_Ikenmeyer/status/1269356119140548611

Comment 9

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Jan Andre Ikenmeyer [:darkspirit] from comment #8)

avoiding the terms black and white for their actual meaning further cements dividing language regarding humans

I do not think it is within the scope of Mozilla's mission to debate the semantics of "white" and "black", or (as your tweets appear to suggest) to try to convince the world that people should stop using those terms to refer to the colour of their own skin. It is definitely not within the scope of this bugreport. I'm going to mark both our posts as off-topic considering the sensitive nature of discussions around race; please do not reply here.

Avoiding the generic whitelist/blacklist terms both avoids the potential for racist connotations and improves the readability of code - code is clearer if it describes the type of thing in the list, or the shared characteristic of the items in the list, or to what use the list is put, and "whitelist" or "blacklist" are not a direct way to do that.

Comment 10

[Jon Bauman [:jbauman:]]

Where should renaming something like https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/build/sanitizers/ubsan_pointer_overflow_blacklist.txt go? Separate sub-issue? I'm just not sure about the appropriate scoping there.

Comment 11

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Jon Bauman [:jbauman:] from comment #10)

Where should renaming something like https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/build/sanitizers/ubsan_pointer_overflow_blacklist.txt go? Separate sub-issue? I'm just not sure about the appropriate scoping there.

It can be a dependency of this bug, I think? This is a metabug, so it shouldn't happen in this bug itself. I'm not 100% sure why it wouldn't want to be a dep of this bug - I'm probably missing something? If not, please feel free to file the dep.

Comment 12

[Jon Bauman [:jbauman:]]

Thanks, Gijs. I've filed Rename filenames containing blacklist/whitelist within Gecko.