From f13283c3f545a351661fe9e35ede1ca677fea06b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Profpatsch Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2020 14:05:39 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] maintainers-list: add a GDPR note, avoid unnecessary data collection MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit 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 the wrong pronouns, because of outdated entries that are dangerous 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. --- maintainers/maintainer-list.nix | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/maintainers/maintainer-list.nix b/maintainers/maintainer-list.nix index 1f9f1a12eab..8879ac8390e 100644 --- a/maintainers/maintainer-list.nix +++ b/maintainers/maintainer-list.nix @@ -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.