On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 2:31 AM Steve Holden <steve@holdenweb.com> wrote:
The commit message used, however, reveals implementation details of the change which are irrelevant to the stated aim, which is making the documentation clear and concise. Use of such language is certainly regrettable, since it carries with it the implication that the Python developer community has somehow been wilfully sanctioning "relics of white supremacy" up until the change was made.
There certainly is a place in tech for politics, as I have argued many times, and I am sure nobody wishes to continue to use language that might be offensive to readers. But I would suggest that the politics can safely be omitted from commit messages, since they can only properly be fully addressed in the conversation about the PR in advance. The wording of the commit message has the appearance (probably specious) of wanting to rub former misdeeds in the face of a largely innocent community, and that is the principal reason I found it distasteful and unnecessary.
I just re-read the commit message, and I think you're being oversensitive and imagining things that aren't there. The actual commit message is written in a straightforward and factual way, and spends special effort on *absolving* the community of this kind of guilt. In particular, it emphasizes that the new text is accomplishing "the same goal", "maintaining the original intent", and describes the old text as a "relic", which is another way of saying that the problems were only there by historical accident, rather than by anyone intentionally keeping it there. Merely mentioning the concept of white supremacy is not an attack on you or the community [1]. -n [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_defensiveness -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org