Re: Bump release date for 3.34 from 9/11

[Britt Yazel <bwyazel gnome org>]

@Andre, as Rosanna pointed out, from a purely practical standpoint do we really want our release announcements on social media to be sandwiched between 9/11 memorial posts? That takes the wind out of our sails pretty heavily if the goal of our Engagement and marketing teams is to raise excitement.

"Celebrate with us this 9/11 when we release out new build!" Doesn't come off well. And, just to be clear, both "Sept 11th" and "9/11" carry equal weighting here in the USA.

The other side of the coin is this, when chosing release dates, we ~should~ try to choose dates that don't have a heavy negative connotation. This isn't an America vs everyone else argument, I'd make the same point if we were asking to release the build on April 15th (the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre), etc. A quick Google search of September 11th brings you to tens of thousands of pages talking about terrorism and war. A quick Google search of September 12th brings you to effectively nothing besides it being Paul Walkers birthday (RIP).

Nevertheless, regardless of the impact to countries outside of the USA, America has REALLY heavily pushed the "9/11" and "Sept 11th" rhetoric in headlines internationally. The attacks in NYC have now become ubiquitous with those dates, and for millions of people are effectively inseperable. And yes, any day of the year can and will be offensive to release a new version on for someone somewhere, but dates like 9/11 will absolutely be offensive to millions, guaranteed. We have people in our foundation that were in NYC on the day the attacks happened, and came to me to let me know that this day is hard for them. For them this day is a pretty big deal.

So my argument is this. Even if you don't care about the mourning and negative connotation that people have with that particular date, purely practically, why would we willingly overshadow our own release?

On Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 5:09 AM Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net> wrote:

On Fri, 2019-08-09 at 19:23 -0500, mcatanzaro gnome org wrote:
> Oops, how about switching to September 12 instead? I don't see any
> compelling need to stick to the usual Wednesday date.
>
> Andreas, Matthias, sound OK?

To me this makes no sense as ~200 other countries out there likely also
have their days to mourn about something in their history.

I think we want to avoid deadlines for tarball creation on days when
many of our software maintainers on this planet might be on vacation
("Christmas" etc) but I don't want to go down the single country road.

If use of the admittedly iconic phrase "9/11" is seen as a potential
problem, I'd recommend to use "Sep 11" or such (makes more sense anyway
as no country outside of the USA could parse "9/11" as a date format).

Cheers,
andre
--
Andre Klapper  |  ak-47 gmx net
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/