I couldn't find any explicit statement by Noordhuis that could be characterized as what Cantrill called an "insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered". I took that to be something Cantrill thought was implied by the revert.

However, there's a deleted GitHub comment from Noordhuis that nevertheless still appears on his public activity stream[1]. I starts with:

> For the record, I reverted the merge in 804d40e. Isaac may be a committer but that does not mean he is free to land patches at will. Patches have t…

Perhaps it was stated there?

[1]: https://github.com/bnoordhuis?tab=activity

Seems not: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

Ultimately, it looks like Ben was fairly impartial about the whole thing - he didn't accept it because it wasn't a significant enough change to merit accepting. He tried to revert the acceptance because the acceptance had been done without approval.

Technically, he was in the right.

Politically, reverting Isaac's commit (and especially doing so with a passive aggressive "Isaac, consider yourself chided." commit message) was clearly a mistake.

A mistake, but only in context of the larger issue. In the context of a reverted commit, it was a fairly laid-back way of saying "you shouldn't have done this direct merge and you probably knew better".

Doesn't look like he did; they appear to be inferring it because he considered the one word change trivial. While I disagree with his call I can't believe how quickly this blew up into a PR storm.

I'm shocked that such an unprofessional blog post made it to the Joyent company blog. It's destroyed what respect I had for them.