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

[Kirsling, Ross]

I'd be thrilled for us to use 'revert'.
Somehow I'd convinced myself that it'd be easier to ask for this if we kept the 'roll' part, but I'm not really sure why I thought so.

Of course, it's fine for folks to continue to _say_ 'roll out' due to habit; I just think it would be great if our automated 'rollouts' turned into automated 'reverts' instead.

Ross

On 3/6/20, 6:31 PM, "Ryosuke Niwa" <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:

    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