Are these problems you've actually had? I have various stuff on GitHub and none of this has remotely happened to me. What you're describing does not jibe with my lived experience of what GitHub is actually like.
"Cop" suddenly became a problematic word and you can read the comments in that issue thread. Imagine you have some repo like "PinkKitty", and then someone blows himself up dressed in pink and pink becomes a symbol of Jihad or White Supremacy or what have you. The same kind of people will then come to your repo and harass you and your unpaid work.
> emilyst commented 11 days ago I live in a country with a real dictator (although not on paper), unchecked police that's just an instrument in the hands of the government, and while no one here has any fondness of the Bulgarian police as an institution or our cops, I don't have any issues with the words "police" and "cop".
"works on my machine"
Additionally I haven't seen a single comment that is "acerbically against it" just calm people making reasonable arguments to not virtue signal. Especially in a way that doesn't even make sense.
When people complain about the OSS community and github this is what they mean. A bunch of rando's who had nothing to do with a project chiming in with breaking changes bec of their feelings. It really is a great example of what the GP is talking about.
A ton of people out there want to prove to themselves more than anyone else that they care about this by doing totally meaningless things like renaming a project that has been maintained and used by thousands of people for YEARS and known throughout the entire (international) community as rubocop with all the reputation, tooling, clout, etc. built over the years, and completely destroy all of that just because you're sad and you feel like doing something to make yourself feel better.
The level of entitlement is just over the top. You don't like the name, fork it, rename it, and use that fork. Advertise it if you want. Don't come and demand from maintainers that have worked on this for years, for exactly zero dollars, to do such a thing. Honestly this is just another thing that turns me off from open source development.
The project name is a pun on a science fiction movie, if the (unpaid) maintainer does not want to change it for compatibility reasons, that's entirely understandable. People should donate money or contribute substantial code effort towards the name change if they care enough.
"Works on my machine" is shorthand for the flippant dismissal that, "I don't need to care about that bug because it didn't show up or cause problems in a deliberately ideal environment."
The repo author is saying the opposite, that it "works" even in "non-ideal environments". That is, he has no inherent negative association with "cop" even in a near-dictatorship where, in practice, most cops are bad and work with impunity, since he thinks the concept is legit (enforcing law and order) even if particular jurisdictions get it wrong.
So, if anything, he was saying, "it even works on forgotten legacy systems"...
From the README:
>The goal of this project is for the rubocop folks to merge this back into rubocop project, and rename its org/repo/domain/etc >The goal is NOT to maintain an ongoing parity fork of an active project
Insanely entitled in my book and far from what I'd call calm or reasonable.
Was it sudden? I mean black people have been being harassed and killed by cops for a long time. Is this only recently on your radar?
A bunch of people suddenly start trying to capitalize on current events to look good → the word cop is treated like a profanity.
(See how that works?)
The only people derailing that thread by being hostile or aggressive are the people who oppose the suggestion.
Another similar change that's rapidly approaching is renaming the master branch to main (which, again, seems like a superior choice to me even divorced from the larger cultural context).
GIMP wasn't even a good name.
RuboCop is probably a trademark violation. I wouldn't have known it was a linter without another post in here mentioning a fork that changes the name. It's the first result on Google for "ruby linter," but it's half a page down on DuckDuckGo.
I didn't really have a problem with "master," but it does seem like it tracks back to master/slave tapes based on a mailing list post, and there are clearer terms to use.
And so on. If people are going to call to arms over a name or term, can it at least be one worth defending? For an industry that worships at the altar of Move Fast And Break Things, some people get extremely conservative about strings of glyphs.
It'd be one thing if these changes weren't improvements, but they are, and opposing them solely because someone you perceive to be an "SJW" is proposing them is overly reactionary.
Interestingly, there is no consensus on what terms are the best to replace master/slave.
Django uses follower/leader. Drupal uses primary/replica. Openssl uses parent/child.
Also, that link isn't even that bad in the grand scheme of arguments I've been involved in online. It's no proverbial shark attack. You can easily just ignore it and move on with your life.
If I were to reach a bit and try to look under the hood at what might be going on, I'd wonder if this behavior is itself an expression of white privilege in America. After all, these demands are based on the idea that one can change usage patterns overnight in one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. To try to exert so much immediate control over something that cannot be owned and that exists far beyond this one country seems to be a very privileged position to take.
> The white liberal aren’t white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. The same as the white conservative is a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro, 20 million black people. A political football, a political pawn, an economic football, and economic pawn. A social football, a social pawn. The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative. So that anything that the Negro does is never for his own good, never for his own advancement, never for his own progress, he’s only a pawn in the hands of the white liberal.
I'm not saying every "white liberal" is like that, or even that they are doing it consciously, but looking at things like this makes me think the people who are arguing for the name change are doing it so they can feel good about themselves while solving a "problem" that wasn't really a problem.
Additionally, I'm not against changing hurtful terminology, but when I see white men arguing white men about what is best for other races or sexes, I kind of roll my eyes. As a white man, I kind of feel my role in all this is should be to listen, understand, and follow.