Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v8 6/8] docs: documentation about static shared memory regions

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Oct 31, 2018, at 3:35 PM, Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx> 
> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 31 Oct 2018, Ian Jackson wrote:
>> Julien Grall writes ("Re: [PATCH v8 6/8] docs: documentation about static 
>> shared memory regions"):
>>> On 10/30/18 6:58 PM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
>>>> I completely agree with you here, and getting rid of the master/slave
>>>> terminology would be nice, in retrospect, it was not a good choice. But
>>>> this is v8 of the series, and as discussed a few times, we encourage
>>>> reviewers to avoid this kind of requests at this stage.
>> 
>> Sorry I'm late to the party.
>> 
>>> While I agree that the design document has been accepted in Aug 2017,
>>> the last things we want is adding more potentially offensive naming in 
>>> Xen. It should not take too much to do the renaming (I am happy to help 
>>> here).
>> 
>> Thanks for your support.  I am also happy to help.  I don't mind
>> whether this is done by the equivalent of filter-branch on the patch
>> series, or with a followup patch to rename everything.  I can
>> construct the followup patch if that would be welcome.
>> 
>> But we need to know what the new terminology should be.  Is `owner'
>> and `borrower' a good pairing ?  `Borrow' is perhaps not quite right
>> because it implies that the original owner no longer has it while it's
>> borrowed.  OTOH Rust has read-only borrows which work similarly so
>> borrowing in a way that doesn't exclude the original has at least some
>> precedent...
>> 
>> I see that the Linux DT document doesn't need to mention the role, so
>> we just need to fix the Xen tree.
> 
> Other options I could think of:
> 
> proprietor / renter
> benefactor / dependent
> 
> But I think owner/borrower is the best choice -- also considering that
> "own" and "borrow" are taught in very basic English classes, anybody
> should understand them well.

master / slave was never the right image, because the non-owning domains aren’t 
being controlled by the owning domain.  But neither really is “borrower” — 
borrowing implies that the original owner doesn’t have it for some period of 
time.

Given that you have one owner and a number of other domains that use it at the 
same time, it’s a lot more like a pub or a cafe than an apartment or loan.  So 
“server / client” is probably the most accurate picture; if that’s considered 
too confusing, maybe “provider / consumer”, or something like that.

 -George

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