Consider renaming the "Blame" button to "Inspect"
In 9.3 (gitlab-ce!10378), we changed the "Blame" button to "Annotate" to promote a blameless culture.
This change was reverted mostly based on the fact that blame
is an established term.
That being said, I think it's still relevant to change "Blame" to something else for a few reasons (I've gathered the arguments from the original MR):
- the word "blame" is negative, independently from each person's understanding of what the
git blame
command does (see its definition in various dictionaries) - not every GitLab users know the
git blame
command so having a "Blame" button can seem very strange to a GitLab newcomer - GitLab's buttons don't map 1-1 to Git commands. e.g. in Git you use
git log
, in GitLab you clickCommits
(for a branch/tag) orHistory
(for a file) - not everyone has the same understanding of what the command does:
- is it to "blame someone for a change"?
- is it to "blame a commit" (which is not semantically correct btw)?
Annotate
was chosen because:
- it is neutral
- it is used in the actual description of the
git blame
command - it is used in some IDEs (e.g. RubyMine)
Other alternative suggested:
- Authorship: even though the "blame" feature actually shows the commits info, which contain author info
- Trace: that's actually how GitHub describes this feature in its doc: https://help.github.com/articles/tracing-changes-in-a-file/
- Inspect: as for "Trace", this one is nice because it's an action on the user' side
Regardless of the choice we'll make, I think we'll need to add a tooltip that explains what the button does (see the great suggestions from Mike here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/10378#note_33166736)
As the original contributor said, I think we have a good opportunity to stand out from the crowd by using an alternative word here (we already do for things like "Merge Request").