Re: Make primnodes.h gender neutral

On 03/17/2016 01:36 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Robert Haas wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 3:31 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
>>> Per the twitter verse, here is an updated version of primnodes.h
>>
>> +1.
>
> +1 what? Are you saying this patch is good? I don't think it is: the
> previous sentence is written in third person, and the following ones are
> currently in third person, but the patch changes the following sentences
> to first person without changing the first one to match. If he or she
> (or they) want this updated, I think we should at least make an effort
> of keeping it as consistent as it is today.

The wording was Meh to begin with. If you would like me to spend some
time cleaning up the paragraph as a whole, I will do that.

>
> I *hope* this isn't the start of a trend to patch 1500 files one by one,
> each on its own thread. That's going to be annoying and noisy, achieve
> nothing useful(*), and cause backpatching pain that the "twitter
> verse"(**) is not going to help with.

So we have two choices I see:

1. As we come across the gender issue, we fix it as well as incorporate
a gender neutral requirement for all documentation unless the gender is
relevant to the context.

2. We do "one big patch".

#2 seems to be a really bad idea.

>
> (*) I'm probably going to be expelled from the project for saying this,
> but I very much doubt that female coders stay away from PostgreSQL just
> because some files say "he" in comments rather than "she" or "he or she"
> or "one" or "they". They probably have different reasons for staying
> away from the project.

Wanna bet? There is a very loud movement about this. We can either:

A. Start fighting about it

B. Just fix it, it doesn't matter anyway and it doesn't hurt the quality
of the code or the documentation

JD

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