[oddevan]

Out of curiosity, what's the harm in accepting the pull request after someone's already done the work?

Edit: I get not wanting unsolicited input from "do-gooders," but if someone on the project made such a change, would you still reject it?

[jamon51]

@buckbova, what's wrong with one-word changes? I run a semi-popular OS project and accept them all the time. It makes the newbs feel good and encourages them to explore further into the source code.

[buckbova]

If I were in this position, I would accept it from a frequent contributor to the project.

I don't like the idea of someone poking around to make one-word non-functional changes.

[kordless]

> one-word non-functional changes

What about typos in docs? Contextually it seems reasonable to accept changes of a single word which may cause confusion on operational grounds.

Is a gendered word really different? Operationally, it would appear differentiating between pronouns might be required in documentation if some readers of the docs are offended by the masculine use. One could certainly argue that with excessive profanity.

I would note here that I probably wouldn't care if someone put 'she' in a document to represent a user entity, but that's a simply an observation of my own biases, not a rational to ignore another's.

[wcummings]

The parent is implying that someone was going out of there way to find pronoun errors, to make a political issue of it, not out of genuine interest in project.

Whether this is actually what happened, or is even a bad thing is up to debate.

[benatkin]

> What about typos in docs?

In my opinion these trivial changes should be submitted as text in a bug report rather than patches or pull requests. For brevity a regex statement like s/foo/baz/ can be used.

[_delirium]

That's a way one could do things, and fairly common with non-GitHub repositories. But it's not the cultural norm on GitHub. The typical process is to submit pull requests even for small doc changes. The interface encourages this by even having an "edit" button and online editor, which wraps up the fork/commit/pull-request cycle into a button push. And the GitHub docs encourage that as well.

[benatkin]

I think any serious projects should have a CLA, or require sign off like the Linux project does, and suggesting a change is the only way to get around having to deal with that.

For known contributors, yeah, it's a nice feature.

[wcummings]

CLA?

[Dewie]

> Is a gendered word really different?

Yes. A typo is objectively wrong (as objectively as you can be in such matters, anyway). Gendered words is a matter of style. One style is to only masculine pronouns, another to only use feminine, to mix them, to avoid them altogether... and it's not clear which are better. Avoiding gendered pronouns altogether might be easier on the eyes for some people, for other people it seems confusing (singular they, what?), for others it is simply grating and hard to read, etc. Similar trade offs for the other options, of course.

We might as well have people who object to words that they interpret as being offensive, like using the word "right" to indicate "correct" or "good". They might feel that it is biased towards right handed people, and that argument seems to actually have some linguistic precedent - even other than English, "right" in some Germanic languages is also a synonym for "higher", another word with "good" connotations. Even beyond this far-fetched scenario, consider all words that could be argued to have a sexist background. Do we ban all of them, or do we just accept that although they have a nasty history, that history does not necessarily translate to how we intend to use them in this day and age?

I also remember some troll on GitHub that started to complain to a lot of repositories - after the Node.js controversy - that their documentation was being sexist. And many of the owners fell straight for it, because apparently it was a well executed troll, and/or they didn't want to risk being dismissive (because, you know, that could end badly for them).

[pbhjpbhj]

>One style is to only masculine pronouns, another to only use feminine //

In English the neuter pronoun is identical to the masculine. "to stop him" doesn't assume that he is male nor female it is agnostic on this point. Unless there is some other indication of the sex of the subject being referred to then you can't necessarily tell. Of course the reason for the use of the masculine pronoun as the neuter is probably historically based in language education being mainly provided to men, but that doesn't mean it needs to be "corrected".

Excepting that point I think I'd agree with what you said.

[snowwrestler]

> I get not wanting unsolicited input from "do-gooders,"

I don't get it. Node is an open-source project that accepts unsolicited input in general...is there some objection to "doing good"?

[oddevan]

That's fair. By "do-gooders" I was referring to rude people that make it their business to point out all of your problems. Their motivation is not to "do good," it's to be right, and I totally understand not wanting to accept unsolicited input from them because, well, they're rude. :)

So basically I was trying to sidestep the strawman argument.

[hartator]

Actually, it was also some red-tape as the contributor was new, he has to sign some documents and be on the CLA.

Source: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015

[jamon51]

Makes sense. For the record, I don't know much about the issue at hand, was specifically talking about one-word contributions (which I encourage on my project).

[benihana]

I think it's less harm and more about principle. Nodejs is presumably maintained by hardworking people who devote their time to making it as good as they can. Presumably there's a bug tracker and they'd love contributions, and presumably this issue wasn't on their tracker (otherwise it would have been accepted outright without any issue).

I can understand the frustration of someone coming into a project and saying "I've made this change that no one on this project asked for cause the words used were offending me." It seems disrespectful to the hard work everyone is doing to keep the project up and running.

I think people would be a lot more open to things like this if there was some proof that removing gendered pronouns actually did something. It's claimed to make open source less hostile for women. Is there any proof that it's working?