Comment on Servo vs Ladybird.

• bjorney@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yes, I’m sure that PR would have been accepted instead /s

  But you’re right, it doesn’t matter at all, the reasonable thing to do would have been for the guy to spend 3 seconds clicking the accept and merge button, or 6 seconds making your change. instead he wrote a comment stating that inclusive language has no place in his project

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Here are the issues I see:

    1. That’s his only PR in this repo, and it just changed one word that wasn’t incorrect for one that’s preferable to the author
    2. The documentation in question is talking about an OS user, not a user of the software, so gender doesn’t apply (“it” would be totally appropriate)
    3. If goes against established norms here, it would be like changing a pronoun for a ship from “she” to “they”

    My suggestion sidesteps the issue entirely by avoiding pronouns, which doesn’t violate norms at all here.

    He didn’t say anything about inclusive language not being welcome, he said politically motivated changes aren’t welcome. If there’s documentation referencing users of telhe software, I’m guessing a change using inclusive language would be treated very differently.

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    • bjorney@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If goes against established norms here

      What’s the established norm here. All people compiling software by source are male?

      he said politically motivated changes aren’t welcome

      What’s politically motivated about changing “he” to “they”. As you said, gender doesn’t apply here, so the neutral word is literally preferable.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        What’s the established norm here

        I’m honestly not sure, most OS projects I’ve seen use passive voice like I provided, because gender doesn’t make sense. I’ve seen a handful of projects select “he” for system users (e.g. root, nobody, etc), so that seems like the norm here, if there is one. Or it could be that the project uses “he” elsewhere to refer to these system users.

        Here’s the documentation:

        Note that the anon user is able to become root without password by default, as a development convenience. To prevent this, remove anon from the wheel group and <pronoun> will no longer be able to run /bin/su.

        This isn’t referring to an actual person, it’s referring to a system user created by the build script in the target operating system (SerenityOS). The user will never be used by an actual human, so any gender selected here is irrelevant, and there should be no preference for male, female, or a third gender.

        That’s why I prefer the passive voice because no gender makes sense, and it just looks weird.

        If I was the maintainer, I too would probably reject the PR because it didn’t remove the gender entirely. Most technical writing does that, because selecting a gender makes no sense.

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