Re: [PATCH] am: counteract gender bias

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 7, 2016, 16:04 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq37nlqvse.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <577E580B.5090000@gmail.com>

Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

> Also, in all (?) other places we use "ours" and "theirs"; it looks like
> git-am was a strange exception with "ours" and "his" (also, it was/is
> inconsistent in using plural vs singular form).  Though perhaps it was
> created before the terminology solidified...

I also thought that "ours" vs "his" was strange mixture of plural and singular when I first saw it, but it turns out there was no mixture.

It originates at 47f0b6d5 (Fall back to three-way merge when applying a patch., 2005-10-06), where the code used $his_tree and $orig_tree, (there was no reference to "our" tree), both singular. They were copied to "git am" introduced at d1c5f2a4 (Add git-am, applymbox replacement., 2005-10-07) almost verbatim.

The use of "ours" & "theirs" is now established, and I agree with you that the use of "his" that is contained to the fall_back_3way helper function (cf. contrib/examples/git-am.sh) is an oddball.

We should just use "theirs" to be consistent from the beginning, as you suggested. There is no need to churn the codebase for political correctness to first use "hers" that everybody knows will *not* be the final form.