I've read that thread a few times and I see the people requesting the change doing so in a calm, reasonable manner. The only non-productive posts I see are from people who are vehemently and acerbically against it.
> 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.