bjorney

You seem content to entirely gloss over the issue, which isn’t the pros/cons of a particular writing style, it’s that the maintainer could have said ANY of the things you said, but he didn’t

If I was the maintainer, I too would probably reject the PR because it didn’t remove the gender entirely.

Cool, but that isn’t what happened here. The PR was closed immediately because the maintainer considered using gender neutral pronouns “personal politics” - he had ample opportunity to clarify his stance, or simply comment ‘resubmit in passive voice’, but he didn’t. Clearly the problem wasn’t the active voice, it was the summary of the change, because when that exact same PR was re-submitted much later with a commit message of ‘Fix some minor ESL grammar issues’, it was accepted with no discussion

As an aside, I absolutely disagree with the use of passive voice. It’s more verbose, and harder for the reader to comprehend. It’s why every style guide (APA, Chicago, IEEE, etc) recommends sticking to active voice, especially in the context of ‘doing things’.

If goes against established norms here

What’s the established norm here. All people compiling software by source are male?

he said politically motivated changes aren’t welcome

What’s politically motivated about changing “he” to “they”. As you said, gender doesn’t apply here, so the neutral word is literally preferable.

Yes, I’m sure that PR would have been accepted instead /s

But you’re right, it doesn’t matter at all, the reasonable thing to do would have been for the guy to spend 3 seconds clicking the accept and merge button, or 6 seconds making your change. instead he wrote a comment stating that inclusive language has no place in his project

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814#issuecomment-830793992

Really?

This screams “women not wanted” to me