GCC Steering Committee Announces a Code of Conduct - Slashdot

GCC Steering Committee Announces a Code of Conduct

›

• Re:

  And you need a "code of conduct" for this.... why exactly?

  • Re: code of conduct

    Because people do not know how - or choose not to - communicate in a civil manner and treat other people with respect, at least over the internet.

    Funny thing, I was watching an old Computer Chronicles episode about modems and BBSs. The issue was exactly the same then. They discussed people âoehiding behind keyboardsâ. I recall those days, although I wasnâ(TM)t connecting to BBSâ(TM)s until a few years after. It wasnâ(TM)t great then, and not only has it gotten worse but it has now s

    • Re:

      Unfortunately it isn't about "respect" anymore and these clowns want submission to their ideologies. Calling someone by the birth gender or using the term master/slave are triggering events for this crop of woke snowflakes.

      • Re:

        and yet yoi are the biggiest offending snowflake why does it hurt you so much to have to repsect other peoples wishes and call them by their prefered title?

    • Re:

      I know it doesn't intend to, but it sounds like I'm gonna get my pull request rejected for rating the Dave Chapelle comedy special 5 stars.

      • Re:

        This is highly likely, not solely bc of having some ground rules -- but due to also introducing a Committee culture, and enforcement regime that involves a group assigned to police others' conduct.

        I guarantee that once the overall group is large enough - you will have some people who would like to initiate action, stir up some drama, "Because they can", or because they are bored.

        The CoC committee meetings will also be boring for their members if they don't also constantly have some issue to discuss, or s

  • And you need a "code of conduct" for this.... why exactly?

    gcc needs to constantly attract new contributors who will participate in their free time, even if free time sometimes means on the job (they need people to wilfully submit patches upstream, whether these patches were developed at home or during job hours), and they will only find people to send patches upstream if it's not a headache to lead with local bully, even if it's only condescending comments.

    Internet community forums frequently have a code of conduct, which is what moderators enforce. For example when you joined Ubuntu forums a while ago you were suggested to pledge to a code of conduct and hence became an "Ubuntero". Big serious projects like gcc just did not think they needed to have one explicitly, because people who join such projects usually are highly educated, highly qualified, experienced professionals (also often boring greybeards), and there is expectation that these behave well without the need to tell them. If there is a risk that not all the community members follow the same rules, and some of them ruin it for everyone else, then you need to makes the rules explicit such that people know what to follow, or as last resort there is some due process to turn away the irredeemable. I can't tell if gcc was in this situation, but better safe than sorry. It should cost zero for most contributors.

    • And you need a "code of conduct" for this.... why exactly?

      gcc needs to constantly attract new contributors who will participate in their free time, even if free time sometimes means on the job (they need people to wilfully submit patches upstream, whether these patches were developed at home or during job hours), and they will only find people to send patches upstream if it's not a headache to lead with local bully, even if it's only condescending comments.

      There is never an acceptable reason for actual bullying.

      But in 3 many years I have been in the workforce, I have had the experience of trying to work with people who consider any criticism, even the tiniest meekest sort as a egregious and unforgivable offense. Interestingly, these people have all been substandard performers.

      We called it "not taking telling", and the result was that the the only goal ended up being to not offend them.

      As noted before, real bullying is not acceptable.

      I had a co-worker who tried to pull that stunt on me. I was designing a new process and system that was going to be used in her department. S I would regularly meet with her and another person from their department to work out the details, and performed the design.

      She wen't to my boss and claimed I was cutting her out of the loop, and not respecting her. My boss pointed to a several inch stack of memos, meeting minutes, and designs and processed I had implemented, and noted that every one was cc'd to her, and the other employee. He knew she was full of BS, but checked with the other employee who noted I was very polite, respectful and listened and went over everything with both of them.

      Now I had suspected there might be something like her action, which had me really go deep into the documentation process. It was also why I had another witness. A form of walking on eggshells

      And if I hadn't? Perhaps

      It would be naive to believe that there would never be cases where someone used actual constructive criticism and tried to turn it into bullying, and a great reason to get rid of anyone who dared to criticize the easily offended.

      So what is your fix? I can tell you that while she was the worst performer in her department, and I was definitely the highest performer in mine. If a volunteer effort, I wouldnot put up with the accusation, so I'd leave, and the person that was incompetent and easily offended, and turning job one into not offending the sensitive one, just perhaps is not going to make the group better, but worse and very likely would get a lot of others to leave.

      But acceptable conduct being job one - competence is much less important.

      • Re:

        Why are you not seeing the described behavior as bullying? Causing drama when good-faith and honest feedback is given is not a reasonable workplace behavior. Yes, unwelcome feedback exists, yes Dunning-Kruger advice is annoying to revive, but the reasonable way to conduct yourself is to politely listen and ignore it (or if you are extra motivated, try to explain your decisions, but that rarely tends to work well).

        • I have had the experience of trying to work with people who consider any criticism, even the tiniest meekest sort as a egregious and unforgivable offense. Interestingly, these people have all been substandard performers.

          We called it "not taking telling", and the result was that the the only goal ended up being to not offend them.

          Why are you not seeing the described behavior as bullying?

          Yes, it is a form of bullying - the term we used for that was a person being a "crybully". This is when a person establishes taking offense as a way to enforce their will. Most people do not want to offend others. The crybully starts off with small transgressions upon their sensibilities, and people comply. Eventually they establish themselves as a de-facto leader, the person who essentially takes over the place, and changes the group purpose from whatever it used to be to not offending them.

          And despite AC's comments, there is no particular sex or gender of the crybully.

          Causing drama when good-faith and honest feedback is given is not a reasonable workplace behavior.

          So true. Where the crybully plies their trade is when any feedback at all is given to them. And sometimes they can become really offended for other people. I had one guy who for some reason would freak out if I gave any feedback at all. I even tried the sandwich method, as well as allowing him to think that some problems were my fault. Didn't matter, he refused to take any criticism at all. Pity was his work was reasonably competent. But if the workplace gets a temper tantrum when pointing out simple things like a typo

          No one should be treated poorly for their sex or gender. But the crybully often conflates any criticism as a personal attack, and attaches their favorite reason for that. See the crybully coward's reply where they try to turn me into both a misogynist because the example I used stated the sex as a female, and a right winger as an added thing to whine about. Bloody hell, I have dealt with males, and females as the perpetually offended. AC crybully just tipped their hand in their reply. And the right wingers in here think I'm left wing. Sorry folks, I'm central in today's US politics.

      • • Re:

          My goodness, your decision to drop to anonymous Coward level was the only intelligent part of your posting.

          Cool conclusions to jump to. Sorry to burst your assumption about her, but she was terminated not long afterwards.

          As for the villain always being a woman - well, you done went and got triggered dint ya homie? I just used her case as an example because it was easiest to use.

          In the 30 + years I was working at that place, there were easily offended people of both sexes. Would you have less booboo

    • Re:

      This goes both ways: you can attract new developers if starting contributing is easy, as just send a patch, no need to read rules and regulations, no need to watch every single word you say, no threats to be banned from project. COCs create bureaucracy and bureaucrats and turn a cooperative project into a corporation.

      • Re:

        Get real. You could always be banned from anywhere. Lack of formal rules never stopped anyone in power from kicking you out.

        • Re:

          That's true, but lack of formal rules reduces mental load and barriers to entry. If you're not a dog you know that being an asshole can get you kicked out. But if there's a "read our COC and confirm" page, you think that there's a bunch of rules you need to follow and if you just wanted to quickly submit a two-line patch, it's likely that at this point you'd go "ah, fuck it" and go away. Because it's not worth the effort.

    • Re:

      And if you wanted to have a PPA, it was required.

    • • Re:

        I've been using the singular 'they' for decades. The word 'they' has been used this way for hundreds of years. 'He' is not and has never been a genderless pronoun. That the default was to assume the person male was, and is, problematic. The solution is trivial, costs nothing, and has been around for more than 700 years. Refusing to do so at this point is inexcusable.

        If that's too much for you to handle, you're the one with the problem. This isn't difficult.

        Now you're being dishonest. You know that t

        • Re: code of conduct

          >I've been using the singular 'they' for decades. The word 'they' has been used this way for hundreds of years. 'He' is not and has never been a genderless pronoun.

          Good for you! I use 'they'. That said, it's incorrect to claim that 'he' has never been a non-gendered pronoun. It clearly has which we know from comments from grammarians and from its usage. Similar deal with 'man', clearly accepted as both masculine and neuter. Clearly we can see law referencing 'he' and 'man' also applied to women.

          • Re:

            No, it's been used when the person's gender is unknown. That isn't the same as it being used as a genderless pronoun.

            • Re: code of conduct

              It was effectively the gender neutral option, alongside 'they' which gained greater popularity in more recent times. It's clear from context 'he' could be used in a gender-neutral context. Are you suggested all historical uses were intended to specify only males?

        • • Re:

            William Safire also said "Iraqis, cheering their liberators, will lead the Arab world toward democracy." while pushing for the USA to go to war with Iraq. Didn't really turn out like that, did it?

            And that wasn't the only wrong thing he said. It turns out he churned out a lot of lies to support agendas that he wanted to see move forward.

            So, maybe let's not go with an agenda-bound pundit's opinion on the use of "they" as a singular ungendered pronoun. Let's turn to something that actually provides historica

            • Re:

              1. You discard a person's opinion on language because you disagree with his stance on Iraq.
              
              2. You cannot comprehend the difference between "he", which my comment concerned, and "they" which it did not.
              
              Stupid and woke. But I repeat myself.

      • Re:

        You are probably confused with something else. You cannot have read about "people's preferred names", none of these words are even present in the text.

        When discussing features and performance of compilers, what's the use of pronouns? The trivial solution, which has always been the nominal good practice, is to not refer to people using pronouns at all, because that's bad taste. Most likely it is possible to quote a message with the USENET > or you give their name; "What Unscanned says is that this gcc fea

  • Re:

    There were recently a few very abrasive "outsiders" who started what were basically flame wars on the main GCC (development) mailing list. These were people who don't contribute code but had very strong, idiosyncratic, ideas about how GCC should behave as a compiler. I would guess that this code of conduct was put in place to make it clearer about how the list's stewards can deal with counterproductive people like that.

    The threads I characterized as flame wars had nothing to do with general politics or id

• Re:

  The CoC appears to be a guide to interpersonal communications between the people working on projects, not a framework for the development of the software itself, or guiding philosophy for software development, etc.
  
  The GNU Kind Communications Guidelines [gnu.org] offer more guidance on what they call, "constructive interactions," and this link came right from the CoC we're talking about.
  
  Anything on their policy or attitude towards either letting or not letting anyone backdoor their software is doubtless covered