My primary opinion on this matter is that "let's not create a drama". Creating a drama is, whether intentional, accidental, unexpected or not, very consuming and basically a lose-lose game. If not creating a drama has a serious implication for the project, the project has to think hard about that, but otherwise (especially like this situation where changing the variable name has no other effect whatsoever) I would just accept that. I think the precautionary measure taken by Mozilla [1] on the Brotli Content-Encoding is an excellent example.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559#c147

But the people can make you do what they want by threatening drama, basically using terror tactics.

Presumably if the general reaction whenever someone raised an issue involving bigotry was for everyone to instantly take on board what they were saying, you might be right. From my experience however, that is definetly not the world we live in. To be honest, even if it was, I think you need to draw a line between hypothetically possible and an observation of what actually happens in the world. The real question is, can you point out any examples of 'terror tactics' (in the context given I take this to mean people using bigotry as a reason for change without actually beleiving it is bigoted)? I wouldn't worry till then

I have clearly indicated that the project has to think hard in such cases. Not every drama can be avoided in advance. Just make sure that we don't intentionally create and keep dramas alive.

same. this could have been fixed silently for it was an unintentional mishap, instead he decided to make a big political point out of it, mailing everyone and consuming a big chunk of brain space out of the whole project for some days, then feeding the internet hate machine with this blog post.

in some ways, he's the one who brought the sexist tone to the whole conversation.

> our accounts had been banned and locked

also it irks me the wording, as there's a difference between "leaving" and being shown the door

That's a good point, yes.

The author could have sent a patch renaming the variable with commit message "oh come on" or "let's be profesional" and it would have probably worked, but instead he wanted to be a hero fighting against (probably not real) sexism.

It seems R foundation has no need for people who want to fell like a hero.

>Was the variable name an accurate description of what it was used for or not? If it was, let it go. If it wasn't suggest a better one.

>Opensource software is not the place to enforce your views on society on someone else.

While I completely agree, if you read the article he did suggest an alternative and submitted a patch.

Rather than the patch being rejected, he got banned from the community.

See below. Not a good look, but we only have one side of the story.

=== The second was a set of emails from Duncan Murdoch, President of the R Foundation and an R Core member, in which he dismissed my "bug report" (note the skeptical scare quotes he put on it) "about some variable name that you find offensive is clearly an example of nothing more than shit-disturbing" and stated that myself, and those who had commented in favour of changing it, were no longer welcome to participate in R's bug-tracker.

I did read the article. A developer in the authors words was "entirely proper, entirely reasonable", named a variable that describes what it does and filed a patch claiming it's "exclusionary as all hell".

Just the type of thing that will create drama, debate, and divide the community.

All because someone reads something into a variable name that wasn't intended... for a variable that is well named.

What's next banning unlucky numbers? Rating colors by political correctness? Favoring data structures because of their religious analogies?

How about saving bug reports for things that actually improve the application?

I don't find the use of the word fanny by Americans to be inappropriate, though it means something completely different in my sociolinguistic context. Even more similarly when a German colleague expresses her enjoyment of driving ("ich möchte fahrt") I'm not about to cry "filth" because one of the words sounds like a rude noise to my puerile mind.

I agree with you regarding the patch, and the name doesn't bother me in the slightest.

However I think Duncan Murdoch, being the President of the R Foundation acted extremely immaturely by blocking the accounts of all involved.

> Imagine if everyone in every culture, using every language on the planet reviewed millions of lines of code and then filed bugs for any word that offended them or could possibly be related to a sexual innuendo.

Slippery slope fallacy. Yes, protesting functions whose initials spell out a cuss word in Swahili would be silly and counterproductive. But no one has proposed that, or anything like that. This is an English-language code base, and there is nothing ambiguous about the English meaning of the phrase "I give head."

Exactly - "I give head" is clearly a reference to Herod's gift to Salome.

If we're looking for juvenile innuendo then presumably give.length and give_log are both also objectionable?

But by deciding to keep this people are “enforc[ing their] views on society on someone else”.

You cannot not act. Keeping the status quo is acting, too. Neutrality is just impossible and you have to decide how you want to deal with these issues in a graceful and fair way.

If there is an issue