Hi all,
On 19/02/2019 14:58, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
Hi Gábor,
On Tue, 19 Feb 2019, SZEDER Gábor wrote:
On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 09:02:43AM +0100, Senol Yazici wrote:
1. Dictator
Concern: "Bad" connotation.
"Benevolent dictator" is a well-established term in open source
projects, and it has an inherently good connotation.
It is a well-established term, alright. Does it have an inherently good
connotation? No, absolutely not. Every time anybody calls me the BDFL of
Git for Windows, it annoys me, to say the least.
And yes, when I pull out my generous self, I can give you that the
*intention* was funny. But to some, it is not funny at all.
Besides, in our field we had pretty established terminology for a long
time. It was the *architect* who had the final say over what goes in and
what stays out. And the respective team leaders were responsible for
respective areas of the code, trusted by the architect.
Further, "googling" dictator does not give Linus as a result in (at
least my) search (bubble).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
Suggestion for substitution: Principal or principal integrator.
These are poor substitutions.
I agree that those are poor substitutions, but shooting down without
giving better alternatives is a poor way to reply ;-)
Ciao,
Dscho
I tend to agree that the 'Dictator' perspective is probably a pretty
poor choice in modern times, while the other (Lieutenant, Blessed, etc.)
word choices are now considered (in much of the millennial society) to
be old fashioned, or worse.
However I do caution that we can't be fair all the time. There are a
range of impossibility theorems [1,2] regarding making things fair.
Ultimately some one (The Maintainer) must make the discriminatory
decision as to what to accept, what to choose, or to reject, or select
their own preference.
A probably bigger problem is actually the limited number of actual
workflows styles that are recorded (and hence shortage of words for
them). For example: patches vs PRs; review process style; even a term
for the users 'backup' repo (on GitHub, GitLab, etc) and how it should
operate. The mental models here can be hard.
Philip
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIXIuYdnyyk Tutorial: 21 fairness
definitions and their politics, Published on Mar 1, 2018
[2] Arvind Narayanan: Associate professor of computer science at
Princeton <https://www.youtube.com/user/33BitsOfEntropy>
