Re: [PATCH 1/4] Documentation: use singular they when appropriate

From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 7, 2021, 17:32 UTC
Message-ID: <9ae26bcd-c6b7-682d-f895-3196c6c04ce2@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <87eedd4n20.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

On 6/7/2021 1:09 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 24 quoted lines

> 
> On Mon, Jun 07 2021, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote:
> 
>> From: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
>>
>> There are several instances in our documentation where we refer to an
>> anonymous user as "a contributor" or "an integrator" or similar. To
>> avoid repeating this role, pronouns are used. Previous examples
>> chose a gender for this user, using "he/him" or "she/her" arbitrarily.
>>
>> Replace these uses with "they/them" to ensure that these documentation
>> examples apply to all potential users without exception.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
> 
> I think this is mostly an improvement, however:
> 
>>  .../using-signed-tag-in-pull-request.txt      | 38 +++++++++----------
> 
> This is a quote from a mail of Junio's[1] (date and all). I don't think
> it makes sense to copyedit that after the fact without at least editing
> the header that indicates that it's a verbatim reproduction.
> 
> 1. https://lore.kernel.org/git/7vehuyosaa.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org/

That's a good point. It does look a little strange that there is an email in our Documentation/ directory. I wondered if this was included in the docs that get posted to git-scm.com, but I see that the link I manually constructed [1] redirects to the GitHub mirror.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/howto/using-signed-tag-in-pull-request.txt

As long as this file remains formatted as an archived email message, the edits here are inappropriate. It's another question of whether the files within Documentation/howto should be updated to be docs that can be more easily posted in places like git-scm.com.

For now, I'll remove these edits from the patch.

Thanks, -Stolee