Hi Suvayu, thanks for sharing your experiences. Clearly we have work to do.
Wrt to specific name changes, I agree with Wes. If something is negative to a non-trivial portion of the population, why not use something that avoids that issue where possible. On Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 7:44 PM Suvayu Ali <fatkasuv...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > (sorry if this is a duplicate post, I always have trouble posting to this > list) > > On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 5:54 PM Todd Hendricks <hendricks...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > > I'm a black data scientist. For whatever it's worth, I have never taken > > offense to the term "Master" branch, as I have never interpreted it to > have > > a derogatory connotation. It's literally never crossed my mind. > > As an Indian person, I would concur with what Todd said. > > That said, I would like to highlight a few things. Since the > community is spending time to discuss how to be more welcoming to a > diverse group of contributors, instead of default branch names, there > are many practically relevant issues that could be addressed. > > I've been trying to contribute to this project for about 2 yrs, rather > unsuccessfully. I come from the perspective of analysis rather than > engineering. But I'm no stranger to technical nitty gritties > (particle physicist at CERN, data scientist at non-technical startups, > scientific software dev). I started by filing bug reports for my > needs (pyarrow and parquet). Most bug reports are still open, they > received a bit of discussion, but mostly they have been assigned and > reassigned to releases for over a yr. On day one I had offered to do > the work myself, but with some guidance, I didn't receive any. So I > gave up. > > Some months later, after Gandiva was released, I came back with the > goal of using it from pyarrow. While after some help I could do > simple tests in C++, getting it to work with pyarrow proved difficult. > I don't remember the exact hurdle, but I decided I would package it > for my distro (Fedora) for simpler compilation. So I contributed a > few patches to the build system to build against system libraries > instead of the vendored versions, including the ability to switch LLVM > versions. I think around this time Kou was overhauling the build > system. My patches were not accepted, but some of the ground work I > did hopefully help Kou. Eventually though, I gave up. > > Soon after, I tried to build a wheel for ARM; I was gathering some > data on an RPi. That didn't go so well either, again, the reason was > lack of guidance. At the time, it was also expressed that wheels are > disfavoured by the community, and not worth maintaining. I see that > position has changed now. > > There is a clear pattern here, if the community is really serious > about addressing diversity and being inclusive, time would be better > spent by addressing issues like contribution guidelines for beginners > (not saying absolute beginners), mentoring, or triaging of open issues > in terms of ease of contribution, and other concrete hurdles for new > comers. I realise people's time is scarce, but you have to start > somewhere. At the least, if someone guides me, I can pick up these > tasks and the maintainers can focus on the more involved roles. If the > issues I have highlighted cannot be prioritised, then wasting time on > superficial issues like default branch names should also be avoided. > > I hope my comments are accepted as constructive criticism. > > Cheers, > > PS: whitelist/blacklist -> accept/reject seems quite reasonable; > personally, colour based terminology has always been very unclear to > me > > -- > Suvayu > > Open source is the future. It sets us free. >
