Comment on Servo vs Ladybird.

• 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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    • bjorney@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If I was the maintainer, I too would probably reject the PR because it didn’t remove the gender entirely.

      Cool, but that isn’t what happened here. The PR was closed immediately because the maintainer considered using gender neutral pronouns “personal politics” - he had ample opportunity to clarify his stance, or simply comment ‘resubmit in passive voice’, but he didn’t. Clearly the problem wasn’t the active voice, it was the summary of the change, because when that exact same PR was re-submitted much later with a commit message of ‘Fix some minor ESL grammar issues’, it was accepted with no discussion

      As an aside, I absolutely disagree with the use of passive voice. It’s more verbose, and harder for the reader to comprehend. It’s why every style guide (APA, Chicago, IEEE, etc) recommends sticking to active voice, especially in the context of ‘doing things’.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        the maintainer considered using gender neutral pronouns “personal politics”

        In this case, yes. Context matters a lot here, and the context is that this didn’t refer to any human user, but a system user.

        What’s the gender of root? The question doesn’t make sense, because root isn’t alive, it’s a technical concept. What gender is your PC? A directory? It’s the same idea, it doesn’t make sense.

        However, switching it from one pronoun to another is politically motivated in the sense that it’s virtue signaling a certain brand of inclusiveness. The only gender that could make sense is whatever is used most frequently, e.g. w/ ships we use “she/her” for whatever reason, despite gender having absolutely no reason to exist. If a gender is used, I’ve seen the masculine, but again, that’s incredibly rare because any technical writer worth their salt would avoid the use of genders altogether because it doesn’t make sense to use a gender in that context.

        And why would he need to clarify anything? The simplest explanation is that this person is knee-jerk reacting to pronouns, and trying to change something that doesn’t matter at all because they see pronoun and think “must be gender neutral.” If they took a couple seconds to think, they would’ve realized that gender doesn’t matter at all here. It’s a useless change, and the reviewer shouldn’t spend any time on it at all.

        I’ve rejected tons of minor changes (e.g. whitespace changes) because it seemed the user was just looking to get their name in the commit log to build a resume or something. That’s a waste of everyone’s time, and this change looks no different.

        It’s why every style guide (APA, Chicago, IEEE, etc) recommends sticking to active voice, especially in the context of ‘doing things’.

        Yeah, that makes sense for most things, but for technical writing, the most important thing is clarity. Throwing a gender where it doesn’t belong is a distraction, and using active voice where it doesn’t belong is as well.

        Check out The Elements of Nonsexist Usage: A Guide to Inclusive Spoken and Written English, in Chapter 4 the author recommends exactly what I’ve outlined here: use “the user” instead of “he/she.” Here’s as Stack Exchange discussion about just that:

        Replace gender-specific possessive pronouns with “the.” Instead of “When the user types his password…” try “When the user types the password.”

        If the PR removed gender entirely, it would’ve had a better change of being considered. It’s still a largely worthless PR though, unless it’s fixing something tangible in the documentation.

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