[chc]

Indeed, and I am not asking malandrew to act like this is important to him. My point is that we should not oppose it, not that you personally need to take action of some sort.

In other words, I'm fine if you don't want to go through and revise your docs to be more gender-neutral — it would be nice, but you should spend your time on what's near and dear to you. But to say that such a change "shouldn't be in any project" is a very different thing. It has practical benefits, even if they don't personally affect you, so opposing it is purely harmful.

[malandrew]

I totally respect that this is an issue that is important to people. I'm not opposed to these changes in the docs. I'm opposed to these being the only changes in the pull requests. You want to crusade on this agenda? Earn it. Submit a non-trivial pull request with a bugfix or feature and bundle these changes that matter to you in with them.

This is a perfect example of a group being it's own worst enemy. Alex Gaynor is not the group. The community is the group. If this matters to Alex then he should have bundled it with something that matters to the community like a pull request with changes of utility like a bugfix or feature.

If and only if Alex had contributed something of universal value to the community in the pull request and was still called out by people for that comment change in the pull request would he actually be correct in his accusation of misogyny and gender discrimination. Instead he led an unjustified lynch mob against someone who has contributed far more than him to libuv.

I'm staunchly opposed to the use of pull requests as a soapbox and unjustly crucifying someone who did not deserve it, and judging by the upvotes, I know I'm not alone in this opposition and support of an unjustly persecuted person.

[tedmielczarek]

This attitude is silly. Lots of volunteer contributors start out making trivial changes because they're trivial. We take lots of trivial documentation and comment fixes at Mozilla as people's first patches. They help contributors learn how the contribution process works, such as the ins and outs of posting patches, navigating the bug tracker, etc. Rejecting trivial changes because the contributor hasn't "earned it" is a great way to raise the barrier to entry on your project. (Also, bundling unrelated changes seems like a terrible practice to promote. We like to have separate issues addressed separately.)

[jacalata]

Do you feel that way about doc changes in general?

[malandrew]

If the doc change is trivial, yes. If it's a significant change in the meaning of the text and how it relates to the code it accompanies, then it should be a separate pull request.

A good litmus test is, "Is there value to the community in having this as a separate pull request when someone is browsing the commit history?"

In other words, if this only matters to me and is part of my own crusade (but one that the larger community is likely to actively object to), then I should keep it to myself.

The change in question here could have been part of a larger commit of changes to documentation and comments, where the overwhelming majority of changes would be considered valuable by the majority of the community.

[jack-r-abbit]

My point is that we should not oppose it, not that you personally need to take action of some sort.

Hmm... but isn't a lot of the rage toward Ben because he didn't take action on something that some people feel is a big deal while others feel it is not such a big deal?

[chc]

I don't think so. People are mad at Ben because he reverted Isaac's commit and they thought it was because he had an ideological axe to grind. They think that Ben wasn't indifferent on this matter.

[jack-r-abbit]

Then they should take great comfort that Ben reversed it based on his thought that proper procedure was not followed. Awesome! We can all calm down now and... oh wait... seems we still have rage. shucks.