The RuboCop Name Drama Redux

A few months ago someone created an issue to make a change to a readme file in a repo for some code of mine. Wasn’t anything big, was just a personal project. They wanted me to change “the good developer comments his code” to “her code”.

I said “sure, I don’t maintain this code anymore but feel free to pull and submit a MR and I’ll pull it in”. They never did. I eventually forgot about the request entirely-because again: I hadn’t maintained the code in quite some time and honestly I only kept it around as a portfolio item.

Months later a second person came and asked the same thing, along with other various additional changes. I invited them too to pull the code, make the change, and submit a MR.

Neither party ever did. I went into the readme and did a find and replace. Merely feeling charitable. Soon I began getting requests to change it back from “her” to “his” and I just made the repo private. No one had ever forked the code, I never even had any issues opened for anything else since the repo was a single-page website template for a local football club I was hosting on GH pages and easily blends into the sea of other code repos. The only interaction the code ever saw was from people wanting me to change a readme file and otherwise probably didn’t give a damn about the code or the template I had “released”.

I’ve started calling these actors “development provocateurs”.

Isn't RuboCop a Robocop reference? Robocop is partially a critique of the militarization and depersonalization of authoritarian law enforcement.

I truly hate this kind of divisive nonsense about normal language.

I really like the author's response after he closed the request and people kept commenting on it.

> Disclaimer: I'm starting to write this at 7 am in my morning, so my thoughts are a bit incoherent.

> I wonder how all of you would feel if suddenly a ton of people who haven't done anything for the project appeared here, told you're a horrible person and started bullying you into doing what they want...

> For almost a decade I've been doing pro-bono work on the style guides, RuboCop and many related projects, but all of this gets easily forgotten. You come out of nowhere, you vilify me over this, you fork the project without even discussing this idea with our team... Whatever. The US has many issues, but so does the open-source community. If even I wanted to rename the project we're talking about 300+ extensions, usages in tens of thousands of projects, messing up with search results that have been building up for years, etc, and an insane amount of work associated with this. I've made nothing out of RuboCop and now you're adding a huge pile of disappointment and frustration on top of this nothing.

> This feels like a great opportunity to double down on the Ruby community ethos and get a ton of positive publicity by rebranding. At the same time, let's recognise that the request implies a bunch of time and even some material expense for @bbatsov (registered domain names, doc sites etc. beyond "just" renaming in code), and some help scoping that out would probably be appreciated if the request is to seem actionable.

> @purcell It's nice to see you around! You might remember how the rename of nrepl.el to CIDER went down - this meant so much additional work and so many confused people for years, that I'd really don't want to walk this path again. And the funny thing is I'll get a lot of hate either way... A couple of years ago I had to undergo the painful process of renaming a widely used project again (tools.nrepl -> nrepl) and there are still people confused today about why there are two of them, why some deps don't work in some cases and so on.

> Everyone, I understand your frustration very much. I've had my share of political activism, I truly support the cause of the people protesting in the US these days, but I think you've got no idea what you're really asking for. If you hate the name you're obviously free to do whatever you wish. I will only ask you to acknowledge the work our team has been doing for such a long time and be a bit more respectful of our time and efforts. I don't even do much Ruby myself these days, but I'm still dedicating a lot of time to RuboCop, because I love the Ruby community. Seems the feeling is not mutual.

I guess if it bothers people so much why don't they just fork it move forward? Do I still have the right to be a jerk if I want to? Is anyone forcing anyone to use rubocop? I am just very confused at this point.

EDIT: Rubocop author posted his thoughts on the whole situation here https://metaredux.com/posts/2020/06/08/the-rubocop-name-dram...