Linux

To elaborate a bit: what that function does (well, tries to do - it has serious limitations, which is why there is only one caller remaining and that one is used only when nothing else can access the filesystem anymore) is "kill given dentry, along with all its children, all their children, etc."

I sincerely doubt that you will be able to come up with any word describing such action in any real-world context that would not come with very nasty associations.

I feel like there could have been better names possible... d_recursive_kill perhaps? I'm certainly not an expert in this system but I find it challenging to believe that "genocide" was the only word that is adequately descriptive of the functionality.

In fact, I'd argue it's not that descriptive, given that genocide involves targeting some group of people based on some trait, like race, culture, disability, etc. - based on the description "kill given dentry, along with all its children, all their children, etc." that doesn't seem to fit...

perhaps I'm overthinking.

I know it doesn't matter, and is fully a side issue to this post, but I hate that "blacklist" gets brought into this. It's never been used to be "a list of black people" or something; that wasn't the original meaning, and that's not the modern intention. It's just a word that sounds like maybe it could have been racist in origin, but it wasn't. And that one makes me grumpy just as an annoying word person.

The real hot take was that we used the term black and white for people at all! If we could go back to the past and make it so we call it, like, Affo and Euro or something, whatever, it would have cleared up a lot of unrelated term confusion.

I mean, if we could go back and change things there's maybe some other stuff that would be more important to change... but among the changes I would make are those!

Why is it always the "it's just a word bro" types who gnash their own eyes out over the prospect of changing one of those words?

Using the word “genocide” in the source code in 2023 is way more weird than using master/slave or blacklist/whitelist. Those terms have been around for decades.

I'm surprised the comments aren't worse over there. The Phoronix comments section shares a striking resemblance to YouTube, but I had to go like 2-3 pages in before the chuds really started rolling in.

I worked on a memory manager back in the days of DOS & extended memory overlays. The original author liked to refer to blocks of memory as “cookies” and temporary variables as “handy”, among other things. My favorites however were a flag identifying memory corruption as “shit_cookie_corrupt” and a panic function when it couldn’t recover that was called ohShitOhShitOhShit().

Name the fonction after a war criminal.

Reminds me of when I worked for EA on the development and release engineering team and we had to scrape all of our Jenkins and QuickBuild code base to remove references of "master" and "slave" and change it to "parent" and "child" or "primary" and "secondary".