Status

Current state: Under Discussion

Discussion thread:

JIRA:

Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

In a number of places our code uses racially charged terms such as "blacklist" and "whitelist". This is a proposal to replace them with neutral terms such as "blocklist" and "allowlist".

This follows the model other open source projects set forth, such as https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/styleguide/inclusive_code.md#racially-neutral

Public Interfaces

Affected configurations and command line arguments will be renamed. The old name will continue to be supported for backwards compatibility, but deprecated.

List of affected configurations

metrics.jmx.blacklist

metrics.jmx.include

metrics.jmx.whitelist

metrics.jmx.exclude

topics.blacklist

topics.exclude

groups.blacklist

groups.exclude

config.properties.blacklist

config.properties.exclude

kafka-mirror-maker CLI

--whitelist

--include

blacklist

exclude

whitelist

include

--whitelist

--include

--topic-white-list

--topics-include

Proposed Changes

In addition to the public interface changes above, internal APIs and other occurrences in code (e.g. method, variable names, comments, and log messages) will be updated accordingly.

Other terms that appear in our codebase we should consider updating:

• replace blackout with backoff

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

Existing configuration names will be deprecated but will continue to work for backwards compatibility. 

Rejected Alternatives

N/A