I forgot to remove a swear word from a PR and it got merged. What now?

Question

The swear word was in Polish, so it didn't draw attention in review. This is a public, open-source project. End users won't see the swear word, but maintainers will when they run the test. Submitting a single line PR to remove that swear word sounds like the simplest solution, but is it the best one?

quantified · Accepted Answer

Your HN profile contains significant professional info. This is a group that might look up your commits to see how bad a word it is. For example, it's 4:30am and I myself am responding to your question out of boredom. If this post makes it to the top of HN, you could well be outed. You will be eventually. Will anyone care?
I'd say leave alone, but... By publicizing this in the first place, you will be contributing to a notion among the puerile that "I can add cuss words to my PR, this guy did". Which maybe doesn't matter that much? Does anyone care?
Is it colorful? What's it aimed at?

Woods369 · Answer

Request a MASSIVE new PR with groundbreaking new changes and bury the mishap in thousands of new additions ;-) or.. keep it in an present as a feature rather than anything malicious .. haha..

bob1029 · Answer

Pretend like it didn't happen.

8organicbits · Answer

It's a personal preference, but you could choose to leave it as-is. Linux, for example, has swear words.https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,d...

vunderba · Answer

Well I was going to suggest changing a single letter on the word to make it non-offensive and put "typo" in the PR message but if it's the four-letter word that I'm thinking of your options are rather limited!