The words “master” and “slave” have been widely used for decades in computing and other technical contexts, as a reference to situations where one process or entity controls another. Nowadays the organization is tackling to getting rid of computer engineering terms that evoke racist history, like “master” and “slave” and “whitelist” and “blacklist.”
So now the Ansible project is working to eliminate racism and other harmful prejudices from the project’s code and community. During the current development cycle, the Ansible project has made significant progress in its goals to make the community and code more welcoming and inclusive.
With the release of Ansible Core 2.11, harmful terminology in the Ansible codebase is deprecated and it comes with new replacement terms.
This effort will continue to be introspective and sensitive to the effects of language and terminology on our community and the broader world.
Over the summer, the Ansible project updated the branch naming for the collections maintained by Ansible. Going forward, “main” will be the default branch for all repositories in the Ansible and Ansible collections GitHub organizations. In addition, harmful language will remain available via aliases for a full deprecation cycle (four releases) to ensure users have an opportunity to update their Ansible configurations and usage.
| Deprecated term | New term (Ansible Core 2.11) |
|---|---|
| whitelist (e.g., callback_whitelist, DEFAULT_CALLBACK_WHITELIST) | enabled (e.g., callback_enabled, CALLBACKS_ENABLED) |
| blacklist (e.g., BLACKLIST_EXTS, BLACKLIST_DIRS) | reject (e.g., REJECT_EXTS, REJECTLIST_DIRS) |
| master machine / node | controller machine / node |
These changes will be included in the Ansible 4.0 package, which will be released on May 18th, 2021.
