Someone submits a 1-line PR changing the gender used in a code comment
PR rejected on the grounds that the change is “politically motivated”
Submitter got mad, and proposed removing the rule against “politically motivated” changes, calling it “white supremacist,” which is closed
Someone wrote a blog post about it
Here’s my analysis:
Stupid change - don’t make PRs that simply correct an irrelevant typo in a comment somewhere; some people do this to put stuff on a resume (look at how much FOSS work I do!), and it just wastes everyone’s time
Stupid response - it should’ve been rejected because it’s a useless change, not because it’s “politically motivated”
Stupid proposal - do you really want to waste a bunch of time fighting over wording in a comment? Because that’s the kind of crap you get without a rule like this.
This is all about an irrelevant change to a comment? Why is this getting so much attention?
I should be an idiot. I dont see a direct relationship between race and sexual orientation. Even if the PR was rejected because a pronounce how the hell this is white supremacist?
Fixing that makes sense because it’s wrong and misleading (it’s actually Manhattan distance), and a quick glace is insufficient to tell the difference.
But fixing a typo or something that wouldn’t be confusing is just noise and should only be fixed with other changes. For example, I intentionally misspelled Pythagorean in my comment above, fixing that to be the right spelling would be a useless change, even if the distance formula used the hypotenuse. It wouldn’t be an unreasonable policy to reject PRs that only fix spelling or similar to reduce noise for the maintainers.
Yep, I understand but disagree. Maybe it comes from working with so many ESL coders, but I’ll happily accept typo corrections because it’s not always obvious what words should be if you’re not steeped in the culture.
If you’re a larger project, you can see a ton of these from people hoping to land a commit to put “contributor to X” on a resume somewhere. Those add up and are really distracting and possibly automated. They waste everyone’s time, especially if they spawn a bunch of conversion like this did.
If you’re a smaller project, it doesn’t matter as much. I work with ESL coders too, so I get it (1/4 of my office is ESL immigrants, and ~2/3 of the broader team is ESL). I fix comments all the time, I just include them with other changes.
So it depends. But in general, a high profile project should reject this noise to discourage this behavior.
Did he? I only saw him point to the rule against politics.
He should have said it’s because the PR isn’t worth the time, but it also seems motivated by something that’s against the rules (i.e. why make a PR that only fixes gender in one comment? There was a later PR that was accepted that fixed it in several places).
So without more evidence, I cannot say what the dev’s motivations for rejecting the PR were, aside from the apparent rule breakage mentioned. They didn’t say they disagreed with the change (i.e. that the change was wrong), just the proposal of the change (i.e. seems more motivated by virtue signaling instead of improving the dev experience). And you can look at the comments and see justification for that position, since it quickly devolved into actual politics with people accusing the dev of being a Nazi.
Maybe if you showed a pattern across more than just this incident (i.e. over months or years), but this sounds more like people being stubborn than tolerant.
DDG search is garbage, I’m sorry… Whenever I switch to a browser that defaults to it, I’m reminded why I always switch it back to Google (unfortunately). Even Yandex is better, and that’s prob Russian spyware.
It was a niche story, I’ll have to dig through the GitHub issues. Basically someone tried to change the documentation pronouns to be gender neutral rather than masculine and the lead dev had a freak out and refused. Really soured me on the project
It wasn’t in documentation, but a code comment. No user would see this.
One part was a rejected change on the README, which was trying to remove this “white supremacist language”:
## On ideologically motivated changes
This is a purely technical project. As such, it is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics or religious beliefs. Any changes that appear ideologically motivated will be rejected.
Someone changing “he” to “they” (original PR that started all this) in a comment as their only change could absolutely be seen as “politically motivated.” My understanding is that if changing the comment was part of some larger useful change, it would be fine (as would using “she” or “they” in a new comment), but just changing the gender of a pronoun in a comment is a useless change.
If the comment said “she,” would someone have been motivated to make this change? Probably not. Should changing this from “she” to some other pronoun (he or they) also be rejected? Yes, on the same grounds as changing it from “he,” it’s not a useful change and just wastes everyone’s time. If you’re in the code already, then go ahead, correct silly language like this if you care to.
They are political, because people (I’m not one of them) think they shouldn’t be allowed and there are only two genders (e.g. the current president of the US).
Someone changing “he” to “they” (original PR that started all this) in a comment as their only change could absolutely be seen as “politically motivated.”
Look at the fallout in the comments on those PRs, it quickly devolved into politics and quickly away from any technical merit.
If this exact same change were included with other changes, I highly doubt anyone would’ve cared about the comment. The issue isn’t with the text of the comment, but with the likely motivation and the actual merits of the PR. Many projects immediately reject tiny PRs because they clog up the review queue, and that appears to be what’s happening here, plus all the political nonsense in the issue comments.
I can’t see anything about this on DuckDuckGo. Do you have a link?
https://mkultra.monster/tech/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird
This was a little „write-up“ back when everything became more public.
I’m surprised this got any kind of attention.
Here’s the turn of events from my perspective:
Here’s my analysis:
I should be an idiot. I dont see a direct relationship between race and sexual orientation. Even if the PR was rejected because a pronounce how the hell this is white supremacist?
Well, didn’t the Nazis also discriminate against gay people?
That said, it’s a massive leap to go from “rejects 1 line PR that only changes gender in a comment” to literal Nazi…
“comments must be accurate,” is not a rule you should bend. Bending it even a little leads to last programming and shit code.
True, but that only applies if it’s misleading. For example:
// pythagoran theorem distance = abs(p2.x - p1.x) + abs(p2.y - p1.y);Fixing that makes sense because it’s wrong and misleading (it’s actually Manhattan distance), and a quick glace is insufficient to tell the difference.
But fixing a typo or something that wouldn’t be confusing is just noise and should only be fixed with other changes. For example, I intentionally misspelled Pythagorean in my comment above, fixing that to be the right spelling would be a useless change, even if the distance formula used the hypotenuse. It wouldn’t be an unreasonable policy to reject PRs that only fix spelling or similar to reduce noise for the maintainers.
Yep, I understand but disagree. Maybe it comes from working with so many ESL coders, but I’ll happily accept typo corrections because it’s not always obvious what words should be if you’re not steeped in the culture.
It really depends on the project.
If you’re a larger project, you can see a ton of these from people hoping to land a commit to put “contributor to X” on a resume somewhere. Those add up and are really distracting and possibly automated. They waste everyone’s time, especially if they spawn a bunch of conversion like this did.
If you’re a smaller project, it doesn’t matter as much. I work with ESL coders too, so I get it (1/4 of my office is ESL immigrants, and ~2/3 of the broader team is ESL). I fix comments all the time, I just include them with other changes.
So it depends. But in general, a high profile project should reject this noise to discourage this behavior.
In theory that’s fair reasoning. Unfortunately the dev made it clear that his reasoning was based on politics
Did he? I only saw him point to the rule against politics.
He should have said it’s because the PR isn’t worth the time, but it also seems motivated by something that’s against the rules (i.e. why make a PR that only fixes gender in one comment? There was a later PR that was accepted that fixed it in several places).
So without more evidence, I cannot say what the dev’s motivations for rejecting the PR were, aside from the apparent rule breakage mentioned. They didn’t say they disagreed with the change (i.e. that the change was wrong), just the proposal of the change (i.e. seems more motivated by virtue signaling instead of improving the dev experience). And you can look at the comments and see justification for that position, since it quickly devolved into actual politics with people accusing the dev of being a Nazi.
Maybe if you showed a pattern across more than just this incident (i.e. over months or years), but this sounds more like people being stubborn than tolerant.
“We don’t accept ideologically motivated changes” = White supremacist language… Yeah, sounds about like what I expected…
Thank you for sharing.
“Don’t Be Evil” happily indexing while Bingcrosoft sleeps
Maybe disabling JavaScript helps?
DDG search is garbage, I’m sorry… Whenever I switch to a browser that defaults to it, I’m reminded why I always switch it back to Google (unfortunately). Even Yandex is better, and that’s prob Russian spyware.
there’s startpage which is a Google wrapper if you’re interested
Actually just tried this for the first time yesterday after switching to librewolf. Have only used it once, but already seems better than DDG.
Try out SearXNG.
It was a niche story, I’ll have to dig through the GitHub issues. Basically someone tried to change the documentation pronouns to be gender neutral rather than masculine and the lead dev had a freak out and refused. Really soured me on the project
Someone else posted a writeup about it.
It wasn’t in documentation, but a code comment. No user would see this.
One part was a rejected change on the README, which was trying to remove this “white supremacist language”:
Someone changing “he” to “they” (original PR that started all this) in a comment as their only change could absolutely be seen as “politically motivated.” My understanding is that if changing the comment was part of some larger useful change, it would be fine (as would using “she” or “they” in a new comment), but just changing the gender of a pronoun in a comment is a useless change.
If the comment said “she,” would someone have been motivated to make this change? Probably not. Should changing this from “she” to some other pronoun (he or they) also be rejected? Yes, on the same grounds as changing it from “he,” it’s not a useful change and just wastes everyone’s time. If you’re in the code already, then go ahead, correct silly language like this if you care to.
Inclusive pronouns are not political, full stop.
They are political, because people (I’m not one of them) think they shouldn’t be allowed and there are only two genders (e.g. the current president of the US).
I never said they were.
Look at the fallout in the comments on those PRs, it quickly devolved into politics and quickly away from any technical merit.
If this exact same change were included with other changes, I highly doubt anyone would’ve cared about the comment. The issue isn’t with the text of the comment, but with the likely motivation and the actual merits of the PR. Many projects immediately reject tiny PRs because they clog up the review queue, and that appears to be what’s happening here, plus all the political nonsense in the issue comments.
deleted by creator
Freakout? Didn’t he just reject?