1643799 - [meta] No derogatory language: Remove references to grandfather

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, task, P3)

Description

[Jon Bauman [:jbauman:]]

In accordance with the "Derogatory Language" section of the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines, instances of grandfather in the sense of the grandfather clause should be removed due to the term's racist origins and associations:

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

This issue serves to identify the various places this terminology appears in our code/documentation/UX and will be blocked by whatever sub-issues are needed to address them and once complete prevent its reintroduction via automation.

Comment 1

[Victoria Wang [:victoria]]

Thanks for your attention to this!

The post above suggest "legacy" as a replacement. I wonder if "backwards-compatible" would be more appropriate for some of our usages?

Edit: I realized "grandfathered" describes the object while "backwards-compatible" describes the subject, so sentences would need to be reworded for that replacement to work. For variables that are named "grandfathered" e.g. referring to a CSS spec, "legacy" may work better, though it's a bit more vague.

Comment 2

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

Note that many instances of grandfather in mozilla-central are in third party code.

Comment 3

[Jon Bauman [:jbauman:]]

Good point, Mike. My initial thinking was to create individual dependent bugs to explore the possibility of getting those changed upstream if possible so that we're doing out best to eliminate all sources of harmful language without having it function as an impediment to making the changes to code we have sole authority over.

Comment 4

[Jon Bauman [:jbauman:]]

I think the first step is classifying all the instances that show up in this search:

Currently, of the 183 results (updated to account for the work in bug 1649312)

Third-party sources:

1. intl/icu: 42 results
2. gfx/harfbuzz: 13 results
3. toolkit/crashreporter/google-breakpad: 2 results. Filed Issue 827: Replace the term "grandfather", which has racist associations
4. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/netwerk/dns/effective_tld_names.dat#12620

Internal sources:

1. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/installer/allowed-dupes.mn#2
2. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/gfx/thebes/gfxPlatform.cpp#2926
3. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/intl/docs/locale.rst#47 (note added)
4. js/src/builtin: 27 results. Blocked waiting on unicode standard update. See bug 1658400.
5. mobile/android: 9 results
6. security/ct: 3 results
7. File names under js/src/tests: 8 results
8. js/src/tests/non262: 8 results
9. js/src/tests/test262: 58 results
10. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/web-platform/tests/css/css-ui/cursor-auto-007.html#39
11. toolkit/components/extensions/test/xpcshell/test_ext_incognito.js: 5 results

"Grandfather", but not in the "grandfather clause" sense:

1. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/extensions/spellcheck/locales/en-US/hunspell/dictionary-sources/orig/en_US-custom.dic#25803
2. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/extensions/spellcheck/locales/en-US/hunspell/en-US.dic#28720
3. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/devtools/server/tests/xpcshell/test_longstringgrips-01.js#28
4. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/dom/tests/mochitest/ajax/prototype/test/unit/fixtures/selector.html#57
5. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/dom/tests/mochitest/ajax/prototype/test/unit/selector_test.js#179
6. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/dom/tests/mochitest/ajax/prototype/test/unit/selector_test.js#290
7. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/dom/tests/mochitest/ajax/prototype/test/unit/tmp/selector_test.html#88
8. testing/condprofile/condprof/scenarii/words.txt: 3 results
9. https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/third_party/rust/mapped_hyph/tests/base.word#1875

I'll start working my way through the internal sources and when I'm done with that will file issues with the external ones to see if they'd accept a patch. The usages that will likely be hardest to change are the references to the attribute defined for language tags here: https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp47. In those cases I'd suggest adding a link back to this issue for context.

Hopefully the usages that aren't in the sense of the grandfather clause are self-explanatory and don't require any change. For the most part these are just word lists, but some are describing relative relationships of nodes. Those could be replaced with non-gendered language, but I'd say that belongs as part of a separate bug if we want to do that.