Change language on blackbox vs whitebox to closedbox vs openbox

[Frederic Branczyk]

Hi all,

I would like to propose to change all occurrences and namings within the Prometheus project of whitebox and blackbox monitoring. In itself the term Black box doesn't seem to come from a racist background, but I think it's problematic when the opposite is "white", in particular as this has a connotation in relation to whitelist/blacklist namings which are undoubtedly problematic. I would like to propose to replace them with open/closed box monitoring, which not only removes any potential of being offensive, it actually conveys much more clearly what is meant without having to explain.

The biggest impact this would have would be renaming of the blackbox_exporter to closedbox_exporter, all other occurrences of this language seem to be limited to documentation.

Best regards,

Frederic

[Bartłomiej Płotka]

+1 to that. Really not big deal technically, but it might matter for the community.

Kind Regards,

Bartek

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[Julius Volz]

Hi,

Good motivation, personally I think that kind of replacement is a good thing to do with blacklist/whitelist (as is happening with flag names in the Node Exporter). But I don't know how people feel about blackbox / whitebox yet, as it doesn't carry the same negative/positive association with colors. It would mean more invasive changes, like renaming the entire repository and related documentation web pages, and potential Google findability confusion (old blog posts etc. mentioning the old name).

I haven't heard blackbox/whitebox crop up in the same way as e.g. blacklist/whitelist yet, but would be interested to affected Black people's opinion on whether this seems troublesome as well. If this turns out to be offensive to affected people, that'd be a good argument for renaming it IMO.

Julius

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[Ben Kochie]

I'm planning to do the flag name change to the node_exporter soon.

I also am not sure about blackbox/whitebox.

How about this proposal: replace "whitebox" with "internal". This better describes what we really mean, removes the black vs white connotations, and simplifies the change.

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[Julius Volz]

Btw. in case we do end up going for a rename, I think Probe Exporter or Prober Exporter would be a nice and descriptive name for what it's doing (active probing of things).

[Bartłomiej Płotka]

I think it's worth to mention the context of this conversation as well: https://github.com/coreos/prometheus-operator/pull/2832#pullrequestreview-332604611

Kind Regards,

Bartek

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[Ben Kochie]

+1 for "prober". We could call it simply "prober". It more directly describes what it's doing.

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[Matthias Rampke]

*resurrecting thread*

I agree that we should rename it. I wince every time I need to call it by name. I often just call it prober anyway and even unaffiliated people immediately know what I'm talking about.

More broadly, I think "blackbox" / "whitebox" monitoring is not very descriptive, and would propose using "probing" and "instrumentation" respectively.

It would take a bit of transition planning, maybe with one "double release" under both names.

What do the maintainers think?

/MR

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[Suraj Sidh]

I am open to a rename if the name is potentially offensive.

I share the same concerns as Julius, and I believe  that we should consider the impact on searchability, and confusion among end users.

Cheers,

Suraj