Alain D D Williams wrote: > That is the big difference. Not use words *currently* deemed > offensive in *new* publications (books, newspaper articles, > ...) - this is not hard to do.
Indeed, and that is what you should focus on. The past is the past anyway. > What we are faced with is something very different: a call > to locate and modify use in programs that might have been > written a long time ago. The effort needed to do this is > large and will doubtless cause failures in systems that have > been working well for years. I must admit the whole concept of source code being offensive is a bit bizarre to me. For anyone to really change that it in a way that makes sense it must be a really offensive word and a general understanding that people reading and writing the code really reacts negatively to it. Because in my experience, people who do this kind of politics aren't typically programmers, even. But I may be wrong and from a technical perspective, it is possible to change source, obviously. > It is not just a matter of modifying Debian (+ RedHat + ...) > sources but the sources on private systems. I think it is a bad idea to go for a clean sweep. That either don't work or end up like the Khmer Rouge. It is enough to remove the most offensive words and expressions, whatever they are, from the most public platforms. > We seem to be told that this must be done by those who will > not be doing the work. Ah, it is okay for people to have opinions and voice them without doing stuff. But sometimes such people somehow get into positions of authority and, worst case scenario, force people who have been doing stuff for ages out of their projects. That's horrible but such instances should not be blamed on the general "opinions but no work" personality, who is actually quite harmless. -- underground experts united https://dataswamp.org/~incal
