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Re: update HACKING file


From: Eric Blake
Subject: Re: update HACKING file
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2016 14:02:30 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.5.1

On 11/25/2015 04:08 AM, Ben Elliston wrote:
> Fairly obvious.

Apologies for going more than a year without replying.

> 
> Cheers, Ben
> 
> ---
>  HACKING | 4 ++--
>  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/HACKING b/HACKING
> index 0005988..a894e1d 100644
> --- a/HACKING
> +++ b/HACKING
> @@ -18,8 +18,8 @@ If a change fixes a test, mention the test in the ChangeLog 
> entry.
>  To this end, the Autotest-mode is handy.
>  
>  ** Bug reports
> -If somebody reports a new bug, mention his name in the ChangeLog entry
> -and in the test case you write.  Put him into THANKS.
> +If somebody reports a new bug, mention their name in the ChangeLog
> +entry and in the test case you write.  Put them into THANKS.

English has historically allowed "his" to serve as a gender-neutral
pronoun (covering both masculine and feminine indirection), while the
use of plural "their" associated with a singular "somebody" is a no-no
in many style guides of yesteryear.  But I concur that modern society
has been changing in its spoken usage, to the point that "his" is often
deemed politically-incorrect when it might rule out women, while "their"
has gained a new meaning as a singular gender-neutral pronoun by enough
native speakers.  So on those grounds, I'm okay applying your patch.
I'll probably do a followup (these days, we don't hand-maintain
ChangeLog, but instead generate it from git).

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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