On 3/17/24 13:53, paul wrote:
Hi all ,
thank you MSavoritias for bringing up points that many of us share.
It's clearly a tradeoff what to do about the past. For the future, as
Christpher already stated, we need a serious solution that we can
uphold as a free software project that does not alienate users or
contributors.
My opinion is that names are just wrong to be included, not only
because of deadnames, but in general having a database with a column
first_name and a column second_name is something only a 35 yrs old
white cis boy could have thought was a good idea to model the spectrum
of names humans use all over the world:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240317114846/https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
If we'd really need to identify contributors, and obviously Guix
doesn't, we could use an UUID/machine readable identifier which can
then be mapped to a displayed name. I believe git can already be
configured to do so.
giacomo
The uuid sounds like a very interesting solution indeed.
I wonder how easy it could be to add it to git.
I agree that making some rules about names that are going to be wrong at
some point or in some place is the wrong solution long term for sure.
MSavoritias
