maintainers-list: add a GDPR note, avoid unnecessary data collection

This change was preceded by the idea of adding a pronoun field to the
file, which we determined to be a bad idea:

* maintainers-list: add pronoun to the optional fields

I often do not know how to address maintainers, so giving them the
ability to specify their pronouns is helpful for communication
purposes.

* maintainers-list: add pronoun for Profpatsch

maintainers-list: make the pronoun field into a list

Some people have a set of pronouns they are fine with, so let’s make
that possible.

Based on feedback by somebody With An Idea™ of the topic.

* maintainers-list: remove the pronouns field

The discussion around the field raised a good point, quoting:

> What you are proposing here is keeping an irrevocable permanent
> history of people’s pronouns. It makes anybody would want to do bad
> things with it one small script away from a list of which Nixpkgs
> contributors are trans. Even looking at the history of name
> changes (which we probably also shouldn’t store) wouldn’t be nearly
> as reliable a source. While it might be tempting to say that
> participating in this would be optional, it would be establishing a
> de facto standard location for this information, that might make
> people feel compelled to participate or accept having the wrong
> pronoun used. Compounding this is the fact that the people who will
> be most comfortable using this field are the people who have never
> changed their pronouns. If they decide to in future, they now have
> to choose between permanently marking themselves as somebody who
> changed or deleted their pronouns (which is dangerous) or leaving
> the wrong pronouns up. Because of this, I think that over time this
> list would probably result in even more people being referred to by
> the wrong pronouns, because of outdated entries that are dangerous
> to correct.
>
> **This idea is extremely dangerous**. If somebody wants to publish
> their pronouns, they can already do that on their website or GitHub
> profile, without having to include that information in a large
> public dataset with history tracking.

So let’s remove it again.
This commit is contained in:
Profpatsch 2020-07-17 14:05:39 +02:00
parent 3829979d8d
commit f13283c3f5

View file

@ -35,7 +35,7 @@
!!! Note that PGP/GPG values stored here are for informational purposes only, don't use this file as a source of truth.
More fields may be added in the future.
More fields may be added in the future, however, in order to comply with GDPR this file should stay as minimal as possible.
Please keep the list alphabetically sorted.
See `./scripts/check-maintainer-github-handles.sh` for an example on how to work with this data.