Closed Bug 383049 (profanity) Opened 17 years ago Closed 17 years ago

Remove profanities from the Mozilla tree

Categories

(Core :: General, defect)

Product:
Core
Component:
General
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: netrolller.3d, Unassigned)

Details

Attachments

(1 file)

Remove unneeded occurrences of "fuck"
7.57 KB, patch
Details | Diff | Splinter Review 
We have at least 7 occurrences of the word "fuck" in our tree, as well as lots of "shit"s (with one "bullshit") and "craps". There are a dozen other profanities in the tree, such as lots of "sucks" and the line "Let's try once again - the previous build was kinda fscked up..." in /build/package/debian/changelog. This seriously sucks ass. We need to remove them, or we are fucked up. The previous two sentences are demonstrations of the problem.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to reproduce:
Search for profanities in LXR.

Actual result: "fuck" is found multiple times.
Expected result: no search results for "fuck" outside the dictionary files.
"This seriously sucks ass. We need to remove
them, or we are fucked up."

You go first?
Stefanik: How about providing a comprehensive list of all words you think should be filtered from the tree?
Majken: Those sentences are demonstrations of the problem. As they don't fit here, they also shouldn't be in the source tree.

Dolske: Here is an incomplete list in wiki style:
*fuck
*shit
*bullshit
*fsck (as a synonym for fuck, though it might remain in places where it denotes the fsck utility)
*ass
*crap
*sucks
*moron
*idiot
*stupid
*damn
*goddamn
*goddam
(In reply to comment #3)

> *crap
> *sucks
> *moron
> *idiot
> *stupid

are you serious?

/extensions/spellcheck/locales/en-US/myspell/en-US.dic,
    * line 12870 -- ****/SMDG

let me get this straight. we're banned from listing words that appear in a dictionary in our dictionary because they're offensive?

that's a load of... oh wait, it seems i can't say that.
timeless, see the last line of comment 0.  Stefanik specifically excluded the dictionary file.
(In reply to comment #6)
> timeless, see the last line of comment 0.  Stefanik specifically excluded the
> dictionary file.
> 

So his opinion is that the dictionary shouldn't be included, while the code should be. That doesn't mean it makes sense.

I think anything that's in our dictionary should also be allowed in our codebase. And if that happens to include profanities, including but not limited to "sonuvabitch" and friends, then so be it.


Pssst: http://mxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/extensions/spellcheck/locales/en-US/myspell/en-US.dic#51790
Just the opposite of what you say! In my opinion, the dictionary *should* be included, while the code *shouldn't* be. My choices of words came from the listing Kuro5hin gave when they checked the Win2000 source code comments. (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795: They found gems like "the fucking alpha cpp compiler seems to fuck up the goddam type "LPITEMIDLIST", so to work around the fucking peice of shit compiler we pass the last param as an void *instead of a LPITEMIDLIST"). We shouldn't have these words present outside the dictionary. That is, the dictionary can remain!
There is no difference between your summary and that of Jesse and me - you don't care about the words in the dictionary, and you do want to remove those words from the code comments. I'm arguing that's inconsistent, see my previous comment.
"Fuck" is offensive, but grammatically correct. So, it should be in the dictionary, to be able to correct misspellings like "fukc". "Fsck" should be added, as it is currently "corrected" to "fuck". The same applies to other profanities (but not "sonuvabitch": that's grammatically incorrect!) On the other hand, there is no need for these words in other places of the source.
This patch removes lots of "fucks" from comments scattered around the tree. I have not yet decided about the "fscked" in mozilla/build/package/debian/changelog, but I think that the entire file should go away, as it's an orphaned changelog left in from 1999!
Attachment #267147 - Flags: superreview?
Attachment #267147 - Flags: review?
I can't decide what to do with these:
gconfig/rules.mk, line 556 -- ifndef NO_MAC_JAVA_SHIT
gconfig/rules.mk, line 595 -- ifndef NO_MAC_JAVA_SHIT
security/coreconf/rules.mk, line 681 -- ifndef NO_MAC_JAVA_SHIT
security/coreconf/rules.mk, line 730 -- ifndef NO_MAC_JAVA_SHIT

We definitely shouldn't have a variable whose name includes "shit".
Why shouldn't we? These are all valid words. If anything, we should change "fsck" to "fuck", since it is the only word you listed there that is not actually a word. Just because you find a word offensive doesn't mean it should be stricken from the codebase.

The only case where this sort of thing makes sense is code samples. I would argue, though, that if you want to show a particular piece of code to a potential employer as a code sample and it has embarrassing or otherwise inappropriate remarks in it, there's no reason you can't remove them or otherwise censor them before sending it.
I recommend INVALID or WONTFIX.
This is a royal waste of time. If we never offended anyone we wouldn't do anything at all.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 17 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
Comment on attachment 267147 [details] [diff] [review]
Remove unneeded occurrences of "fuck"

kill the fscking review requests from that stupid bug - or whatever.
Attachment #267147 - Flags: superreview?
Attachment #267147 - Flags: review?
Actually my reason for this bug is to avoid "You are no better than Micro$oft, your source is full of "fucks" and "shits"-style remarks. If Kuro5hin hadn't published that review, this wouldn't be a problem, but since they did, we can get negative remarks for this.
Frankly, I don't think we care if we get negative remarks from idiots....
If profanities in source code is worth mentioning in a "negative" for a review... I take that as a badge of honor.  If they need to dig that deep, lets give it to them.
If we'll modify comments and variable names in our code base basing on the "review" of some other product on some website and our worry that we'll get negative review of 9 years of Mozilla project work because of that... we're fucked.
(In reply to comment #17)
> Actually my reason for this bug is to avoid "You are no better than Micro$oft,
> your source is full of "fucks" and "shits"-style remarks. If Kuro5hin hadn't
> published that review, this wouldn't be a problem, but since they did, we can
> get negative remarks for this.

Only morons would care about a goddamn 3 year old article. Screw them.
I think we need to have an option in bugzilla to add a resolution type of "FUCKIT" for situations like this.
That's a good point, Robert.

Also, I think the profanities should be localizable. We need lots of "kurwa mać" and "verfluchte Scheiße", not just some plain boring "fucks", don't we? :D
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