Are these problems you've actually had? I have various stuff on GitHub and none of this has remotely happened to me. What you're describing does not jibe with my lived experience of what GitHub is actually like.
"Cop" suddenly became a problematic word and you can read the comments in that issue thread. Imagine you have some repo like "PinkKitty", and then someone blows himself up dressed in pink and pink becomes a symbol of Jihad or White Supremacy or what have you. The same kind of people will then come to your repo and harass you and your unpaid work.
Oh wow, that was hard to read and I only made it through the top 10 comments. Getting brigaded because some people are over sensitive must be a horrible feeling.
I've read that thread a few times and I see the people requesting the change doing so in a calm, reasonable manner. The only non-productive posts I see are from people who are vehemently and acerbically against it.
> emilyst commented 11 days ago
I live in a country with a real dictator (although not on paper), unchecked police that's just an instrument in the hands of the government, and while no one here has any fondness of the Bulgarian police as an institution or our cops, I don't have any issues with the words "police" and "cop".
"works on my machine"
Additionally I haven't seen a single comment that is "acerbically against it" just calm people making reasonable arguments to not virtue signal. Especially in a way that doesn't even make sense.
When people complain about the OSS community and github this is what they mean. A bunch of rando's who had nothing to do with a project chiming in with breaking changes bec of their feelings. It really is a great example of what the GP is talking about.
They high-road the guy until their's no room left for discussion. They stop just short of calling him a racist authoritarian for naming his package RuboCop years ago. The creator isn't even from the US, it's a bit ignorant to assume the entire world shares their personal world view, and worse to assume the rest of the world should cater to it. I am entirely sympathetic toward the US' plight right now, and we have had protests in my city in a different country in solidarity. But it's a US systemic and cultural problem specifically, we probably shouldn't accuse random people from other countries of being racist just because they aren't immediately up to speed with your issues.
A ton of people out there want to prove to themselves more than anyone else that they care about this by doing totally meaningless things like renaming a project that has been maintained and used by thousands of people for YEARS and known throughout the entire (international) community as rubocop with all the reputation, tooling, clout, etc. built over the years, and completely destroy all of that just because you're sad and you feel like doing something to make yourself feel better.
The level of entitlement is just over the top. You don't like the name, fork it, rename it, and use that fork. Advertise it if you want. Don't come and demand from maintainers that have worked on this for years, for exactly zero dollars, to do such a thing. Honestly this is just another thing that turns me off from open source development.
That "works on my machine" comment in particular is flippant and definitely degrades a complex discussion in my opinion.
The project name is a pun on a science fiction movie, if the (unpaid) maintainer does not want to change it for compatibility reasons, that's entirely understandable. People should donate money or contribute substantial code effort towards the name change if they care enough.
Yeah, that remark really bothered me and I felt like it misunderstood the point.
"Works on my machine" is shorthand for the flippant dismissal that, "I don't need to care about that bug because it didn't show up or cause problems in a deliberately ideal environment."
The repo author is saying the opposite, that it "works" even in "non-ideal environments". That is, he has no inherent negative association with "cop" even in a near-dictatorship where, in practice, most cops are bad and work with impunity, since he thinks the concept is legit (enforcing law and order) even if particular jurisdictions get it wrong.
So, if anything, he was saying, "it even works on forgotten legacy systems"...
>The goal of this project is for the rubocop folks to merge this back into rubocop project, and rename its org/repo/domain/etc
>The goal is NOT to maintain an ongoing parity fork of an active project
Insanely entitled in my book and far from what I'd call calm or reasonable.
It is the opposite of calm or reasonable. It is impulsive and downright flabbergasting that one would be so entitled to expect this kind of change to be merged into mainline rubocop backed behind such weak arguments.
I agree, practically everyone who's upset in that thread is villifying "SJWs" and "thumb democracy". I get this is a hot topic and people have strong feelings about it, and it's important to consider that the maintainer of this project probably feels personally attacked by this. But this is how discussions happen, respectfully, calmly, with educational links. 15 issue comments isn't "brigading". Asking someone to consider that the name of their project is problematic isn't shaming.
What's fascinating to me is this sort of abrupt and demanding language policing seems to overwhelmingly be a phenomenon with white people. This is very strongly reflected in those comments. This is something I've repeatedly noticed; I don't have much insight or commentary beyond the observation itself. (It's also very US-centric, though that is less surprising to me.)
If I were to reach a bit and try to look under the hood at what might be going on, I'd wonder if this behavior is itself an expression of white privilege in America. After all, these demands are based on the idea that one can change usage patterns overnight in one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. To try to exert so much immediate control over something that cannot be owned and that exists far beyond this one country seems to be a very privileged position to take.
I'm not normally a Malcolm X guy, but I read this quote from him recently and I feel like it put into words my feelings on these type of things far better than I ever could.
> The white liberal aren’t white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. The same as the white conservative is a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro, 20 million black people. A political football, a political pawn, an economic football, and economic pawn. A social football, a social pawn. The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative. So that anything that the Negro does is never for his own good, never for his own advancement, never for his own progress, he’s only a pawn in the hands of the white liberal.
I'm not saying every "white liberal" is like that, or even that they are doing it consciously, but looking at things like this makes me think the people who are arguing for the name change are doing it so they can feel good about themselves while solving a "problem" that wasn't really a problem.
Additionally, I'm not against changing hurtful terminology, but when I see white men arguing white men about what is best for other races or sexes, I kind of roll my eyes. As a white man, I kind of feel my role in all this is should be to listen, understand, and follow.
You'll quickly stop being surprised on this one because this change is inevitable across the industry in the coming years. I too had the same reaction when I was first exposed to the change a year ago, but now I'm "meh" about it. Language evolves a lot over time, surprisingly quickly. And allowlist/denylist really are better words to describe what's going on, even ignoring the other connotations.
Another similar change that's rapidly approaching is renaming the master branch to main (which, again, seems like a superior choice to me even divorced from the larger cultural context).
RuboCop is probably a trademark violation. I wouldn't have known it was a linter without another post in here mentioning a fork that changes the name. It's the first result on Google for "ruby linter," but it's half a page down on DuckDuckGo.
I didn't really have a problem with "master," but it does seem like it tracks back to master/slave tapes based on a mailing list post, and there are clearer terms to use.
And so on. If people are going to call to arms over a name or term, can it at least be one worth defending? For an industry that worships at the altar of Move Fast And Break Things, some people get extremely conservative about strings of glyphs.
Good point about GIMP. That always was a terrible name. Sometimes we coders are too "clever" for our own good and need someone who knows about branding to rein us in.
It'd be one thing if these changes weren't improvements, but they are, and opposing them solely because someone you perceive to be an "SJW" is proposing them is overly reactionary.
How likely is it? I don't refuse to swim in the ocean because of the very rare shark attack. You can always point to the most extreme examples of something but if 99.99% of people will never be affected by them, then why make them the primary driver of your decisions?
Also, that link isn't even that bad in the grand scheme of arguments I've been involved in online. It's no proverbial shark attack. You can easily just ignore it and move on with your life.
I don't see what's so bad in that link. It's not a good suggestion, but it was made in a polite and respectful manner. There was some good discussion, and ultimately the creator said no and laid out his reasons why.
The only people derailing that thread by being hostile or aggressive are the people who oppose the suggestion.
