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On Jenkins Terminology Updates

Marky Jackson
Marky Jackson June 18, 2020

In 2016, the Jenkins community decided to start removing offensive terminology within the project. The "slave" term was deprecated in Jenkins 2.0 and replaced by the "agent" term. Other terminology was slated for review after the cleanup of the "slave" term which was considered as most problematic one. In 2017, the project began tracking areas for correction. Work has been done on renaming the SSH build agent plugin as well as gradual removal of offensive naming in services and repositories. This year, a group of core contributors continued addressing this critical work.

The Advocacy & Outreach SIG met to discuss and prioritize the continued work. The governance board has also met and there will be more information coming regarding removal of offensive terminology. Last week we took another step towards removing offensive terminology within the project by updating previous blog posts and removing offensive terminology in old blogs, cleaning up some references in Jenkins built-in documentation and localization, etc. The meeting minutes are available here and a recording of the meeting here There is more work to do. The core team is working to address terms such as "Master", "whitelist" and "blacklist" as well addressing git branching terminology.

We could use your help We continue to do this much needed work and would like to remind everyone that the Jenkins project is governed by the Code of Conduct.

Sincerely, Marky Jackson

About the author

Marky Jackson

Marky Jackson

Hi! Super happy you found me here. I’m Marky Jackson and I am a lover of family, friends and a die-hard San Francisco Giants fan. I left my heart in San Francisco in the summer of 2020 and now reside in San Diego, California. I am a founder and research scientist at [methodair](https://methodair.org) with a focus on [project-julie](https://github.com/methodair/project-julie). I was previously a Jenkins Goverence Board as well as the Jenkins Events Officer, a Kubernetes Org member, a Kubernetes Release Manager Associate, a Continuous Delivery Foundation Ambassador, a Jenkins core contributor, a Jenkins Google Summer of Code org admin and mentor, a Google Summer of Docs org admin and mentor, and helped with software development and community management on the Ortelius Project. I have had profiles in the CNCF and other mediums. In the past I have spoken publicly and enjoyed writing blogs on technical topics. Previously, I was named the Most Valuable Jenkins Advocate. Finally, I was previously a mentoring lead within the Kubernetes project as well as a previous Kubernetes Outreachy coordinator for the Kubernetes project.

You can find me on Twitter @markyjackson5 or on GitHub @markyjackson-taulia.