[webkit-dev] Terminology: Could we change 'roll out' to 'roll back'?

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 6:15 PM Kirsling, Ross <Ross.Kirsling at sony.com> wrote:
>
> Late on Friday seems like a good time for a terminological debate (), so I’d like to propose we revisit one of the strangest items of WebKit-specific terminology: the phrase ‘roll out’.
>
> In our industry, the typical meaning of the phrase ‘roll out’ is, of course, ‘deploy’ or ‘launch’; this corresponds with the colloquial usage of ‘roll out’ to mean ‘depart (for a destination)’. In WebKit, we use ‘roll out’ to mean the exact opposite, ‘revert’ or ‘roll back’.

I think the ship has sailed on this one. People who have been working
on the WebKit project for long enough are so used to the phrase
"rollout a patch" that it's gonna be tricky to change the terminology.
Having said that, I'd much prefer the term "revert" over "rollout" or
"rollback". It's also the term git uses.

> This term is confusing enough for native English speakers outside our community, let alone non-natives (since phrasal verbs are notoriously tricky as it is).

As a non-native speaker myself, I never find this term confusing
because I have no mental model of what "rollout" or "rollback" means.
However, I find those two terms infinitely more confusing than the
very direct "revert".

- R. Niwa