[sneak]

No, this is trivial and his stand was just him being pointlessly argumentative. It's entirely unproductive from both an equal rights standpoint as well as a technical one.

Drama for drama's sake is and should remain a firing offense.

[veemjeem]

If you read the github thread, you'd see that Ben actually never participated in the drama/discussion until it blew up. Ben essentially rejected the pull request, then a giant PR nightmare blew up overnight with blog posts from Joyent & Strongloop. He decided to leave because of the whole ordeal from the companies.

[wpietri]

I read the github thread.

Ben closed the sincere and well-meant patch, saying, "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." He didn't just participate in the drama; he started it.

Non-drama options would be things like: asking the contributor more, asking a colleague to look it over, asking a native speaker why it mattered, and just moving past the pull request and leaving it for somebody who cared.

[malandrew]

It was a trivial change. It didn't help me nor anyone else understand the code being commented on any better, nor did it change any executable code. That's about as close to the definition of a trivial[0] change that I can think of. Pronoun choice is of little value of importance since this is a open source project, not a college gender studies class. If you think that's not trivial, then take it somewhere where it's not considered trivial and spare everyone else the bikeshedding.

[0] definition of trivial: of little value or importance.

[wpietri]

I understand you believe it was trivial. Maybe Ben Noordhuis still does too. Others disagree.

Using power to force one's own view because one can is a problematic behavior in open source projects. It needlessly costs contributors. And respect.

[malandrew]

Please explain to me what view you think Ben was forcing upon the community, because I do not think the view you and others nerd-raging here is aligned with reality.

Ben was forcing the view that the commit policy had not been followed, which is a view that the rest of the community agrees with. This all got blown out of control when someone misinterpreted Ben's actions and started a bikeshedding tempest in a teacup instead of figuring out why Ben considered it a trivial change.

I don't know about you, but everyone who went off the deep end in that thread basically joined a lynch mob based on misunderstanding and failure to seek clarification for the commit reversion. The burden was on those who were upset to seek clarification instead of brandishing pitchforks and torches.

I don't think anyone who has contributed to the NodeJS repo joined because they wanted to bikeshed over gender issues. I'd be surprised if anyone (other than the author of the commit that started all this) joined to commit with that as a primary intent (or secondary, tertiary, etc.).

[wpietri]

The view forced was that the change was trivial.

That's the same view you're trying to force here. But at least Noordhuis has the virtue of possibly believing that. You clearly don't; you've got 9 dismissive, rage-y comments on this article. That's not how people react to trivia, which you were helpful enough to define as of little importance.

I think you correctly recognize the topic, which is the politics of gender inclusion, as important. It's just that you disagree with the people who proposed and support this change. I'd rather you were honest enough to say that, rather than trying to get us to swallow the notion that this this totally unimportant thing is totally important.

[sampo]

> "Please explain to me what view you think Ben was forcing upon the community

The view that the improvement to the documentation text was trivial.

[smf]

Exactly. Well said.

[regularfry]

The way I saw it, there was one blowup when bnoordhuis rejected the initial PR, but it magnified hugely when he then reverted isaacs's commit applying the patch from the PR, "chiding" him in the process. According to the IRC log, isaacs made the commit "acting fast to prevent it from blowing up further into a whole big thing."

Looking at the IRC log, here's a weirdery: The initial patch (47d98b6) and the merge commit isaacs made (5812e19) both appear in the IRC log. bnoordhuis' revert (804d40e) doesn't. In fact, the revert isn't discussed at all.

[fauigerzigerk]

I guess in big corporations general rules like this may be useful to consistently deal with several such incidents per month. But in the context we're talking about, language like "firing offense" is itself needlessly dramatizing.

If someone creates drama about something all the time I may not want to continue to work with that person. But if after years of working well together, mistakes are made in one particular conflict that gets out of hand, I'm not going to delegate the matter to Catbert's office right away.

Yes, documentation should be gender neutral. But no, one argument about this should not lead to a core developer leaving.