Am Fr., 26. Apr. 2019 um 18:12 Uhr schrieb <mcatanz...@gnome.org>: > I'm a little surprised that nobody has yet mentioned the elephant in > the room. The definition of "git" is not very inclusive: > > [...]
I really did not want to comment on this thread initially, but I would like to add a thought to this afterall: While I think a reasonable effort should be made to keep language inclusive and especially not explicitly exclusive, I think that we also must expect a level of tolerance from people joining any community (especially a multicultural one), just because cultures are so vastly different, like interpretation of languages is, and one will inevitably be in a position where certain word choices or communication threads feel strange to them. If one approaches a situation not assuming that the other party is after you or has bad intent, one may learn about how words are used differently in different contexts and communities. My association with "git" is primarily the revision control system, "master" is primarily associated with the pristine branch in a Git repository or a controlling process/procedure, etc. This is because I learned about what these words mean in a computer context. If I was reading a history book on slavery, "master" would of course be charged with a different meaning in that particular context. Language is in constant flux, and we, just by using a word, will add a different meaning to it, eventually displacing whatever connotations the word had previously, or adding new meaning to it in a new context. E.g. I would never have thought about "master" being gender-specific at all, simply because I hadn't yet seen the word used in a context where it explicitly meant that. I am not in favor of banning a word just because it has negative connotations in one context, because it creates a lot of additional work as well as mental barriers ("what am I allowed to say?") or derails discussions. E.g. as a German, I find the word "euthanize" to be a bit strange due to our history, yet, it is a commonly used word in medical texts and scientific publications. I know what the word means in this context, so I am perfectly fine with its usage, because due to that I also know the intent of the people using the word and that there are no bad connotations at all. Another example would be the "weboob" package that we removed from Debian because of its sexist name(s) and images. There was a really large discussion about it, as "weboob" as a pure name on its own, standing for "web outside of browsers" isn't actually considered to be sexist by everyone. However, the package was eventually (and very rightfully so) removed because in accumulation, given how upstream acted and how modules of the software were named and illustrated, it was beyond any doubt clear that the intention behind the name was indeed to deliberately be sexist and to explicitly provoke, which is not something we would want in our community. (Please note that I simplified the incident a lot here) Master/slave used in conjunction is somewhat of a gray area, because here it really is an analogy to slavery, sort of (the master fully controls the slave which is acting on their behalf, executing any requested task). Of course, the context is different here as well (IT vs. history), and nobody should really think the author of code containing the analogy is supporting slavery, or that the community makes any statement about slavery. Since this word pair is an intentional direct analogy to very dark history though, personally I think that if it can be replaced, it should be. Please don't ready any of the statements above as an attempt to be super-objective - I don't think that is possible, and I don't even think objectivity can be the goal here, as the issue is so deeply tied to individual opinions and experiences as well as cultural histories and the languages one knows. That's why IMHO the "right" solution here is actually ultimately what the community comes up with collectively, and what feels right for us. Cheers, Matthias -- I welcome VSRE emails. See http://vsre.info/ _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list