Bug#391717: [Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#391717: gender in /etc/passwd

[Robert Millan]

On Sun, Oct 08, 2006 at 02:11:33PM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Sunday 08 October 2006 13:44, Christian Perrier wrote:
> > > passwd maintainers, what do you think about this?  The idea would be to
> > > add a gender field in the GECOS, please see the bug log for details and
> > > rationale.
> > >
> > >   http://bugs.debian.org/391717
> >
> > I personnally dislike the idea (why gender and why not religion or the
> > like.....I think that the rationale of l10n is a bit haircutting,
> > here).

Well, there are some constructions (even in English, although much less common)
that can only be made with assumption on the user's gender.  For example in
Catalan (and probably most latin languages) you can't ask "Are you sure you want
to xxxxx?" (a pretty common question in computing) without assuming the user is
male or female.  Usualy the former is assumed, but I find this a bit
disrespectful, specialy since making debian more friendly to the female public
[1] is a common concern in our community nowadays.

[1] Which reminds me debian-women might want to be CCed..

> > But, anyway, this is something that should be discussed with
> > our upstream and he should discuss it with other distros.

Is kloczek at pld.org.pl the right upstream contact address?  I sent the same
request to him roughly a month ago, but received no response (not sure if due to
lack of interest, time, or just mail breakage).

-- 
Robert Millan

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