
The RuboCop Name Drama Redux - mindfreeze
https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091
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dvtrn
A few months ago someone created an issue to make a change to a readme file in
a repo for some code of mine. Wasn’t anything big, was just a personal
project. They wanted me to change “the good developer comments his code” to
“her code”.

I said “sure, I don’t maintain this code anymore but feel free to pull and
submit a MR and I’ll pull it in”. They never did. I eventually forgot about
the request entirely-because again: I hadn’t maintained the code in quite some
time and honestly I only kept it around as a portfolio item.

Months later a second person came and asked the same thing, along with other
various additional changes. I invited them too to pull the code, make the
change, and submit a MR.

Neither party ever did. I went into the readme and did a find and replace.
Merely feeling charitable. Soon I began getting requests to change it back
from “her” to “his” and I just made the repo private. No one had ever forked
the code, I never even had any issues opened for anything else since the repo
was a single-page website template for a local football club I was hosting on
GH pages and easily blends into the sea of other code repos. The only
interaction the code ever saw was from people wanting me to change a readme
file and otherwise probably didn’t give a damn about the code or the template
I had “released”.

I’ve started calling these actors “development provocateurs”.

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whymauri
Isn't RuboCop a Robocop reference? Robocop is partially a critique of the
militarization and depersonalization of authoritarian law enforcement.

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baggy_trough
I truly hate this kind of divisive nonsense about normal language.

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hpoe
I really like the author's response after he closed the request and people
kept commenting on it.

> Disclaimer: I'm starting to write this at 7 am in my morning, so my thoughts
> are a bit incoherent.

> I wonder how all of you would feel if suddenly a ton of people who haven't
> done anything for the project appeared here, told you're a horrible person
> and started bullying you into doing what they want...

> For almost a decade I've been doing pro-bono work on the style guides,
> RuboCop and many related projects, but all of this gets easily forgotten.
> You come out of nowhere, you vilify me over this, you fork the project
> without even discussing this idea with our team... Whatever. The US has many
> issues, but so does the open-source community. If even I wanted to rename
> the project we're talking about 300+ extensions, usages in tens of thousands
> of projects, messing up with search results that have been building up for
> years, etc, and an insane amount of work associated with this. I've made
> nothing out of RuboCop and now you're adding a huge pile of disappointment
> and frustration on top of this nothing.

> This feels like a great opportunity to double down on the Ruby community
> ethos and get a ton of positive publicity by rebranding. At the same time,
> let's recognise that the request implies a bunch of time and even some
> material expense for @bbatsov (registered domain names, doc sites etc.
> beyond "just" renaming in code), and some help scoping that out would
> probably be appreciated if the request is to seem actionable.

> @purcell It's nice to see you around! You might remember how the rename of
> nrepl.el to CIDER went down - this meant so much additional work and so many
> confused people for years, that I'd really don't want to walk this path
> again. And the funny thing is I'll get a lot of hate either way... A couple
> of years ago I had to undergo the painful process of renaming a widely used
> project again (tools.nrepl -> nrepl) and there are still people confused
> today about why there are two of them, why some deps don't work in some
> cases and so on.

> Everyone, I understand your frustration very much. I've had my share of
> political activism, I truly support the cause of the people protesting in
> the US these days, but I think you've got no idea what you're really asking
> for. If you hate the name you're obviously free to do whatever you wish. I
> will only ask you to acknowledge the work our team has been doing for such a
> long time and be a bit more respectful of our time and efforts. I don't even
> do much Ruby myself these days, but I'm still dedicating a lot of time to
> RuboCop, because I love the Ruby community. Seems the feeling is not mutual.

I guess if it bothers people so much why don't they just fork it move forward?
Do I still have the right to be a jerk if I want to? Is anyone forcing anyone
to use rubocop? I am just very confused at this point.

EDIT: Rubocop author posted his thoughts on the whole situation here
[https://metaredux.com/posts/2020/06/08/the-rubocop-name-
dram...](https://metaredux.com/posts/2020/06/08/the-rubocop-name-drama-
redux.html)

