[Koha-bugs] [Bug 18432] New: Most code comments assume male gender

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.koha-community.org]

https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=18432

            Bug ID: 18432
           Summary: Most code comments assume male gender
 Change sponsored?: ---
           Product: Koha
           Version: master
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P5 - low
         Component: Developer documentation
          Assignee: gmcharlt at gmail.com
          Reporter: ephetteplace at cca.edu
        QA Contact: testopia at bugs.koha-community.org

Throughout the Koha codebase, the pronoun "he" is used to refer to a generic
third person who could be of any gender. For instance, in C4/Suggestions.pm
line #66:

'When a librarian manages the suggestion, he can set the status to "REJECTED"
or "ACCEPTED".'

That assumes all librarians are male. It's particularly problematic given that,
in the US at least, the profession is heavily female. In other files, all
borrowers are assumed to be male. In the interest of making the code base more
inclusive, it'd be better to not assume a male gender.

The patch—which touches *a lot* of disparate files but almost only
comments—changes all instances of "he" or "him" I could find to "he or she" and
"him or her" respectively. I'd also be in support of singular "they"/"their" in
these situations if people prefer that. In a few cases, a non-human object was
being referred to as "he", so I used "it" instead.

FYI, the regex I used to find uses of the pronoun "he" and "him":

- / (H|h)e (?!or she)/
- / (H|h)im (?!or her)/

I ignored "docs/history.txt" and "misc/release_notes" since those seem to refer
to actual men who worked on Koha, and also the Maori translations. There were 3
"unimarc_framework_DEFAULT.sql" files also used "he" in a way that seemed to
refer to a particular individual, though I'm not sure.

Testing plan: 

- I can't really formulate a "testing plan" for this patch since it shouldn't
impact actual executing code
- The patch does touch strings in a few tests so at the very least these should
continue to pass:

 M C4/SIP/t/06patron_enable.t
 M koha-tmpl/intranet-tmpl/prog/en/modules/cataloguing/additem.tt
 M t/db_dependent/Circulation.t
 M t/db_dependent/Koha/Patrons.t
 M t/db_dependent/Reserves.t

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are watching all bug changes.