[malandrew]

I agree gender issues are important. Pull requests are the wrong place to begin that debate. NodeJS was not started as a asynchronous framework for server side javascript with gender inclusive comments.

The project was never gender exclusive. The comments could have easily used the pronouns she instead of he. Whoever wrote the comment chose he for whatever reason. Had someone else who has a different gender pronoun preference written the code being commented on, then it would have been different. It doesn't really matter because it's irrelevant to the purpose of the project.

Yes, I disagree with people wasting the committer's time with something that simply does not matter. Pronouns don't matter. He, she, it, user, dog, cat, lamp. If it's not code or comments that further clarify the code in question who cares because it simply does not matter. Knowing or not knowing the gender of the example user in the comment doesn't change anything about the code. Were we really supposed to believe that it was only going to send the nsent flag is the user is male and that we are not sending the flag if the user is female.

People should either code or not code, but they should not pretend to contribute with trivial pull requests that have been one huge net negative addition to the project due to the shitstorm kicked up. That's all the original pull request has accomplished ... one big massive net negative addition to the community. What an excellent way to make your point and endear people with your cause. I hope they are happy with the turd they left in the pool.

You know what statistic I would love to see. Lines of code contributed by those who think the change is trivial versus those that think it is not trivial. That's the only worthwhile objective measure of "important" that really matters. I bet you that the conversation on that PR is actually really really short once you eliminate everyone who has never contributed a pull request.

[wpietri]

> Pronouns don't matter.

You keep turning your opinions into supposed statements of fact. Given how little you know about this topic, you're just embarrassing yourself.

Pronouns matter. The politics of it may not matter to you, but they matter to a lot of other people. They also matter in terms of reader perception. E.g.: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/27784423?uid=3739560&u...

We are coming out of centuries of systemic gender discrimination. The tech industry still has substantial problems in this regard, and is under intense scrutiny, internal and external. Arguing to ignore improvements in favor of the status quo is arguing to support gender discrimination. Arguments like that are especially suspicious from somebody on the good side of gender privilege. Especially double-talk arguments about how vitally important it is to resist this one specific trivial patch.

Also, you can't blame the shitstorm on the person submitting the pull request. After all, you keep asserting that it's trivial, the very smallest of things. The shitstorm started with the rude, dismissive rejection of the pull request. If you'd like to blame something, blame that.

[malandrew]

    "Also, you can't blame the shitstorm on the person 
    submitting the pull request."

Why not? You can't unilaterally decide that that person cannot be to blame here.

They could have made a contribution of utility (bugfix or feature for example) and included that minor comment change within that pull request, instead of using a pull request as their own personal soapbox. Github issues and pull requests are not forums for debating the politics of gender issues. As someone who had never once submitted a prior pull request with utility to libuv, Alex Gaynor should have made his change silently as part of a bugfix or feature and moved along. His behavior was antisocial.

[Lazare]

Or as an alternative, he could have privately emailed an existing contributor, discussed the change, and got support. If it had come from Isaac or Bert to start with, it would have sailed through without objection.

I really feel like a pull request was the wrong vehicle for what the original submitter was trying to accomplish.

[wpietri]

I see what you're saying, but I disagree.

If open-source projects adopt an "email first before pull request" approach, I think that's a big mistake. That will mean a lot of dialog with people who aren't actually going to do the work, and a lot of missed patch opportunities from people who have done or will do the work but are put off by the uncertainty of a policy like that.

Regardless, if a pull request is the wrong vehicle, then the correct response isn't, "Request rejected! Go away." It's "Let's talk about this more." It was a two-line change that made the project better. (At least, nobody has so far claimed that the gender-exclusive language was better.) I think that's enough of a positive signal to be worth following up on, and certainly not the dire insult that some believe it to be.

[Lazare]

I see your point, but I'm not suggesting a general "email first before pull request" policy, which I agree would be a big mistake.

I feel like this was actually a very unusual situation.

[wpietri]

Ok. If it's not a policy, then I don't think there's any way you can expect a potential contributor to know that a particular pull request must be preceded by discussion. In which case, I think the burden falls on the person reviewing the requests. In this case, Noordhuis. The submitter did their bit by making a positive change and offering the patch.

[malandrew]

This.