Re: adding gender field on debian developer's database (from debian-devel)
Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, Aug 02, 2005 at 08:26:45AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
>> Quoting fabienne s (fabienne@fabienne.us):
>> > hello d-w,
>
>> > so i'm interested in what you think here on the list about including
>> > someone's gender (i *think* that's what he meant by "sex" below) in the
>> > debian developer's database? has this guy never seen the list on debian
>> > women of developers and women in the nm queue? (see email quoted below
>> > from debian-devel)
>
>> Well, if you follow the video from the talk of Erinn and Magni at
>> Debconf, you'll see someone suggesting exactly this (namely
>> myself). This should be about 1 hour from the beginning (I don't have
>> the video here).
>
>> This triggered a lot of reactions and not all of them were
>> positive. Most of the people reacting against it raised that this
>> would make us enter a kind of grey area where non technical
>> information is put in the database.
>
> Isn't mailing address information just as non-technical as a "sex" field
> would be, or the oft-requested jpegPhoto field?
Except that the mailing address provides some means of communication
or helps to distinguish in case of name conflicts. Also think about
people that need someone to sign their key and are looking for someone
near them.
> I'd rather have a birthdate field anyway, so DDs can be duly harrassed
> whenever they turn a year older. :-)
I think a certain person that shall remain banned from D-W would love
a gender field in the db to bring flaming death to all female DDs
while it brings no real use to anyone else. Anyone that is intrested
in such personal details can get to know the repsective DDs and find
out him/herself. It also takes the fun out of guessing.
I too would rather have a birhdate (does not need to include year of
birth) field. While being just as useless technicaly I see no risk of
abuse and lots of happy birthday mails coming from it.
MfG
Goswin
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