Fedora Stakeholders Debate Concerns Over "Karma" Term For Their Updates System

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Stakeholders Debate Concerns Over "Karma" Term For Their Updates System

The latest terminology within the Fedora camp causing concern is "karma" that's long been used for conveying feedback around package updates with their Bodhi software used for gating Fedora Linux package updates...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Bodhi-Karma-2024

[avis]

What sucks about bodhi is something they seemingly don't give two f-ks about: once you leave a comment on a package you will receive all future comments about it on your email and there's no option to disable this behavior.

Maybe Fedora engineers could fix basic features instead of chasing dubious labels.

[NathanSamson]

Fedora due to connections to some religious beliefs

What did bodhi mean?
bo·dhi. ˈbōdē plural -s. : the state of enlightenment attained by a Buddhist who has practiced the Eightfold Path and achieved salvation.

(Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bodhi)

So are they also discussing a name change of Bodhi then...

[Danny3]

That was a strange term to use in the first place!

[stormcrow]

Maybe Fedora engineers could fix basic features instead of chasing dubious labels.

Labels that shouldn't have been used to begin with. People seem to forget that people can fix past cultural insensitivity while chewing gum and writing code. Almost as bad as Ancient Aliens cultists who believe all humans are too stupid to harness fire, build huts, or notice chewing certain plants relieved pain. Only some of us apparently can't seem to figure out how groups can manage more than one task at a time or that their pet peeve may not matter to said group.

[Quackdoc]

religious stuff aside, I agree with the change in general because it's a weird place to use this term anyways. I don't know of any definition of the word where it makes sense to use it, and if there is a good one, then I would disagree with the change

[uid313]

Probably a good idea to change it, karma is a widely misunderstood concept, I think there should probably be some other term that is clearer, such as "score", "rating" or "points".

[coder]

I think there should probably be some other term that is clearer, such as "score", "rating" or "points".

I'd prefix any of those with "approval" or maybe "feedback".

If you think about it, the feedback ratings system on marketplace sites like ebay perhaps even better fit the analogy of karma, but they've done just fine using other names.

[mb_q]

Fedora is not alone, karma is, for instance, the name used by Reddit and, according to Wikipedia, this naming was started by Slashdot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_metric , so I can imagine the whole thing was called Bodhi as a result of being a karma accounting system.

Is it actually insensitive? Given programming sins, C++ bibles and BSD daemons? For me this is a remnant of the early hacker culture, which was actually honestly interested in Buddhism, and a contrast to the sterile corporate void in which racism is just a taboo.

And, as a reactive force that keeps post alive, I would say, it is actually pretty close to the theological karma...

[Luke_Wolf]

That was a strange term to use in the first place!

Not really. Buddhism was big in American popular culture from the 70s through the early 10s due to Kung Fu movies creating a popular trend of people practicing Asian martial arts, and thus coming into contact with eastern philosophy, and so karma came into western thought as a system of effectively good boy/bad boy points which is why most of these upvote/downvote systems make reference to it.

However given the bodhi reference this software was probably actually written by a buddhist.