(I could easily imagine it in the community management so I'll take your word for that, but I've only really interacted with the IRC channels where this wasn't an issue)
- User doesn't like that dining philosophers is cited with some male and/or gender-neutral pronouns and placeholders (even though the original exposition was already changed to female pronouns) -- proceeds to change the rest of the pronouns to female (I guess gender-neutral didn't make sense) https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/25640
- User thinks "bad code style" is offensive https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/41646
- User doesn't like brotli encoding type being called "bro" https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559#c147
- User thinks that the code of conduct is too general in its suggestions that all people be respected and treated fairly -- it needs to explicitly cite certain groups https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-www/issues/268
This stuff is absolutely ridiculous. Write a code of conduct, make sure everyone is respected, and make that the end of it. Changing documentation to gender-neutral pronouns is something I can actually get behind -- nevertheless, that's still not fair apparently.
1) "User" is the principal engineer of most of Gecko's network stack and pointing out that using that name will lead to complaints during the standardization.
2) The code in question isn't Rust at all.
I mean why even bring this up given (2)?
I didn't know that. The fact that a lead engineer is entertaining people who are upset with "brotli" being abbreviated to "bro" is honestly case in point.
2) Again, what has it got to do with Rust?!
But that's exactly what all of your examples are. In each situation the decision and action was to make things as neutral and inclusive as possible. That there are people in any given community which want things to be taken in a different direction (any direction, social or otherwise) seems like a pretty natural thing.
The real difference in why the kernel can work with that and other projects can't is the D in BDFL. What Linus says goes, so there's an ultimate arbiter (for better or worse) that can settle these problems, and set the tone. The LKML doesn't need a code of conduct because Linus is the example of conduct, which in this case is "words don't matter put up or shut up". That'f fine, as long as you're aware and okay with marginalizing the people that don't deal well with that, which can, and has happened on the LKML. But that's a choice for Linus. Rust doesn't have a BDFL, so there's no ultimate authority to define what's right or wrong for Rust and the community around it (as much as a BDFL can for something at large as a language). In that situation, a code of conduct that exists to set some sane defaults can be useful.
For a programming language community though I don't think that's the kind of approach to take. Sure, it could work and you may get some very talented people to help, but it's also arbitrarily limiting the kinds of people who can contribute and feel welcome based on the thickness of their skin, not on their technical ability. You may consider this timewasting, but I think it's more like a clever and nuanced form or marketing. Not only do you get the benefits of including more potentially skilled people into your community, you encourage them to actually get involved with the language. It seems like a worthwhile investment to me.
Dude what you listed are trivialities and if you consider the throughput of Rust project the time taken must surely be negligible. I wonder what Theo or Brad think about timewasting on that other paragon of a project you mentioned.
Rust goes to great lengths to keep everyone happy, but ends up putting off people like you, who don't like projects going to great lengths to keep everyone happy :)
While the example isn't within official documentation, it does demonstrate the lead Rust devs placing a lot of importance on social politics, and tip-toeing around such politically sensitive topics as coding style.
Again, as the OP stated, nothing in how the Rust development community handles itself can be stated as bad. They go out of their way to be inclusive to everyone, and I think that's admirable. The way they go about it, at least from the example I found, is a bit tacky. There are more important things to bikeshed about than the name of a simple option, and in doing so it can come across as a bit tacky. But what do I know, perhaps I'm the real problem here!
It was about changing the name of a lint from "bad-style" to "non-standard-style".
I still don't understand what this change has anything to do with social politics. Nor was this really related to being inclusive or whatever, it was just about being nicer.
Sure, there are more important things to do. But that's true for just about any bikeshed, that's pretty much a prerequisite for a discussion to be a bikeshed.
> While the example isn't within official documentation, it does demonstrate the lead Rust devs placing a lot of importance on social politics, and tip-toeing around such politically sensitive topics as coding style.
That's a major extrapolation. I'm not a lead rust dev (I do have commit/r+, I guess that can count). I drive-by filed an issue during a conference talk that I thought would be a small improvement that would be nicer to newbies and also just more accurate ("bad style" doesn't actually convey anything, why is it bad?). Various rust devs posted opinions and thoughts there.
Nobody was tiptoeing or anything. You're grossly misrepresenting what happened there.
Imagine approaching Linus Torvalds at a conference and telling him that you think people who choose to disobey the documented code style (which I, and most others, do not necessarily use outside of Linux kernel code) are just using "non-standard code style".
But as you yourself mention, folks use different code styles in different places. This is about being clearer about that.
The better analogy here is GCC calling non-GNU style C code "bad" in all repos it is run on.
Rust as a community is much more uniform wrt code style than C is, which is why the compiler even does things like warn about nonstandard style, but that's just it -- the style is non standard, not intrinsically bad in anyway (and "nonstandard" is better at explaining what's wrong than "bad" is).
In what wicked world do you live where the word "bad" is considered as a "not-nice" word should not be said in order not to risk offending people ? What's next ? Replacing "error" by "potential incorrectness" ? This is 1984-like. No one should have to be afraid of words.
Feel free to continue to call it bad style within the Rust community. Nothing 1984-like about it at all. It was a request for changing some wording, one which could have been rejected, and we would have moved on, because it was a drive-by issue that I didn't care about much.
You're ascribing a lot of intent and background to that post, intent that wasn't there.
Edit: replaced “minority” with “underrepresented group”, as that is the language used on the website [1].
[1]: http://blog.rustfest.eu/this-week-in-rustfest-5-tickets-dive...
Having just looked this up because I wasn't aware of it, I wouldn't classify that statement as true. They allow/ask for donations to help people from diverse locations attend.
https://ti.to/asquera-event-ug/rustfest-zurich/
NOTE: THIS IS NOT A CONFERENCE TICKET. Support us bringing the opportunity to attend RustFest to more people around the globe who otherwise couldn't afford it. Anything you offer here will go into our diversity pool with the sole purpose of helping people from underrepresented groups attend RustFest.
That doesn't mean minorities necessarily, and even if it did, it doesn't mean everyone in that group gets a cheaper ticket. From the first sentence though, it seems obvious they are trying to get diverse nationalities, not necessarily diverse ethnicity from the hosting country.
RustFest sponsors folks who couldn't otherwise attend with tickets (and sometimes travel and other things, I forget the details). This includes students (IIRC)
They also have tickets on the site which you can buy to add money to the sponsorship pool.
> We believe in diversity and would like to provide support to people of many different backgrounds. This includes, but is not limited to people who belong to one or more of the following groups: people of color, women, nonbinary and gender non-conforming people, disabled people, people with mental health issues, and LGBTQIA+ people.
Scholarships are a pretty normal thing wrt conferences.
Have you ever used a discount that was available only for "new customers"?
EDIT: I see that 'Manishearth pointed out that these are not discounts, but scholarships.
First of all: RustFest is unaffiliated with Rust, the project. We are in touch, but we run our own ship. I _am_ member of the Rust community team, but my function within RustFest is not that one. Currently, I am the only person in the team with _any_ capacity within Rust, the project.
Most applications for this program are from places that the Rust community currently does not cover with conferences, which has a value to the wider community (spread). It is the express goal of this program to speak to people we would otherwise not reach. We had great success with our outreach program and it's meeting it's intended goal (having a more fun crowd around). We constantly tune it. We've been working and improving this program since around 10 conferences (I ran eurucamp and JRubyConf.EU before and are in close contact with other conferences running such stuff). Almost all people buying a ticket fund these things by either buying a supporter ticket (at 200EUR) or a small donation. They approve.
So, this may be "social politics", I'm very upfront about this, but this is not "we throw something at the wall and see if it sticks". No, we do it precisely because it is a working driver to growing a community. We have a stated goal: a more diverse community many people feel welcome to. We measure, we improve. Just 1.3% of respondents of this survey said they feel "not welcome", I consider that a smashing success. That's around 1/30th of the people that don't use Rust.
Yes, we give out scholarships to people that could or would otherwise not attend the conference. This is according to multiple factors, ranging from being unemployed to being a person from a marginalised group.
I also find it telling that you single this statement out, but for example pass on our wide commitment for accessibility http://zurich.rustfest.eu/accessibility/, which is much more extensive than what most other conferences provide. Also something we've been working on since _years_ and constantly improved. It attracts people. A great many conferences are very sub-standard here.
We do, by the way, also have a travel stipend for people that contributed to the current Rust quality push: http://blog.rustfest.eu/libz-blitz
Note that RustFest is a fully produced 2 days conference at a price point of 100 Euro or 50 Euro for Students which pays _all speakers full travel_ and is able to pay support for people in need. Running all 6 months. That's _dirt cheap_ if you consider we have to pay all bills and no one is giving us stuff for free. We are a sustainable business, if you want to consider it such.
In the end, I want to state clearly: sales and invites to our conference are at our own discretion, that's why we run them. It's the privilege of our work, we're not cogs silently turning a stage.