Analysis of Use of Inclusive Language and Potential Impacts on Eiffel Community

Description

There is an ongoing debate and various initiatives are ongoing in order to improve the language used within open source. Various communities and organisations are working on replacing the terms they use with more inclusive terms.

Here is the page where Linux Foundation Networking is collecting such initiatives: https://wiki.lfnetworking.org/display/LN/Inclusive+Language+Initiative

And another reference regarding Jenkins: https://www.cloudbees.com/words-have-power-updating-industry-terms

Eiffel Community will be impacted by this change one way or another so it is important for us to attempt improving the language used across the projects within Eiffel Community and look for impacts that may be caused by other communities and organisations we interface.

One example of such organisation is GitHub. GitHub plans to switch from master to main for naming the default branch. It seems this is already implemented for newly created repositories and existing repositories may be impacted as well.

More information about GitHub plans to do is available on: https://github.com/github/renaming

Motivation

Switch to using inclusive language and analyse & prepare for potential impacts.

Exemplification

Linux Foundation Networking: https://wiki.lfnetworking.org/display/LN/Inclusive+Language+Initiative Jenkins: https://www.cloudbees.com/words-have-power-updating-industry-terms GitHub: https://github.com/github/renaming

Benefits

Use of inclusive language and being prepared to potential impacts. Eiffel Community will need to analyse the terms used in the code base and identify if improvements are necessary. Apart from that, the existing CI/CD pipelines may be impacted by the changes introduced by other communities and organisations so the work that's done by Eiffel Community will limit such impacts.

Possible Drawbacks

Impacts on codebase and existing CI/CD pipelines.

eiffel-community / community