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gon@lemm.ee 3 days agoThat blog post is pretty ridiculous, IMO.
You’ll see the alt-right do that a lot, for some reason.
There’s real criticism, but they always mix it in with some made-up complains like the slavery thing, which is some of the most obvious sarcasm I have ever seen on the internet, but somehow taken literally by the author of the post.
IDK if he’s a transphobe or whatnot, but his reaction to the change in language was indicative of, at the very least—with the most charitable of interpretations—, a disregard for inclusive language and, more realistically, some philosophy that doesn’t allow for “others” to participate because the existence of those that aren’t male is “political,” somehow.
You might not see it, because you haven’t seen it enough times to recognize it, but it happens again and again and again… But it’s always quiet.
“Don’t make this political,” “ideology isn’t welcome,” stuff like that. Statements that sound reasonable, but are only wielded to quiet those aiming for inclusiveness and acceptance of marginalized people.
It might sound like a less-than-generous interpretation, a bit callous and over-zealous, but it’s just patterns. I hear wolf, I say wolf.
Also, I thought that article had a really funny passage:
One activist (“cafkafk”) seen below, within the GitHub repository for the developer being attacked, celebrating the fact that other activists – organized on “The Fediverse” – had arrived to harass the Ladybird developer.
This alone made me think that it might be satire, but I don’t think it is… The Fediverse, huh? OK.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I would’ve rejected the PR too, but not for violation of that rule, but because one-line changes that merely fix a comment waste everyone’s time reviewing it, and are often just to build someone’s resume. I’ve even seen some that remove trailing whitespace.
If you want to fix it alongside other changes, go for it (and the reviewer said as much on the PR). But if you’re only interested in sending in drive-by commits to build a resume or something and aren’t actually interested in helping, then it should be rejected as noise.
If there’s a broader pattern of this, maybe that’s cause for concern. But if it’s literally just this instance, I could see the dev being annoyed at drive-by PRs.
gon@lemm.ee 3 days ago
That’s exactly what I was talking about. You’re taking what they said reasonably, because you’re probably a reasonable person! However, look at what they’re actually saying. The issue wasn’t framed as being a “drive-by,” though later that’s what they claimed. It was about ideology. It was about politics. They didn’t pull up rules about one-line changes to justify not accepting them, they pulled up rules about talking politics.
The problem wasn’t that it was a meaningless PR, the problem was that it was a meaningful PR that they disagreed with.
And, quite frankly, disagreeing with that does make you an asshole, at the very least, and a transphobic misogynist, at worst. There were at least a few PRs open about similar issues, too.
Look, I’m not calling him a transphobe or a misogynist; I’m just saying this was an asshole thing to do, and it was done in an asshole way, and that allowing this sort of thing to exist, especially in FOSS, is not good. That’s all.
Check this out: mkultra.monster/tech/…/serenityos-and-ladybird
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
But that’s the problem, it’s both a drive-by, useless change and a politically motivated one. If you show up to a project and submit a change that violates multiple rules, it’s dealer’s choice which one to pick.
With asynchronous discussions like this, it’s impossible to know their motivations, so it’s helpful to assume the best instead of the worst.
From that:
Here’s the PR in question. It was merged, probably because it didn’t just change “he” to “they” in one spot (but did just that in a few spots), but actually fixed confusing language.
And then after it was merged, there were tons of irrelevant comments about the policy and other PRs.
The one I pulled here included changes from the other rejected PRs. Maybe this was by a different reviewer, idk. That said, it’s still a little iffy since it’s just fixing grammar and especially pronouns that aren’t really relevant to the code it’s commenting.
I probably would’ve accepted that last one because it fixes stuff in a lot of places rather than one (quantity has a quality of its own), and accepting it will hopefully stop PR spam.
He may be. Idk.
My criticisms here go to everyone involved:
It’s stupid drama all around.
Fixing comments is fine. If you’re going to only fix comments, at least fix a bunch of them at once, and ideally more than just a pronoun or grammar mistake here and there. English isn’t everyone’s first language, so assume the best and don’t waste everyone’s time with useless changes.
gon@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Sigh, you do have a point.
It was. Some other member of SerenityOS, not the person behind Ladybird (awesomekling).
That’s fair. I’ll say though, the blog post is dated from 1 day after the PR was actually merged. It’s not unreasonable to think that, when they wrote it, it really hadn’t been merged and they only saw the initial denial citing the policy.
Yeah, I was just trying to say that that wasn’t the point of my rant. I get it I get it.