Looks like it was originally committed as a snowman, changed, then committed again, then finally removed. Quite the flurry of activity over a tiny character that sits in the background quietly increasing the consistency of browser behavior and saving the world from cross-encoded text.

It was quite a good case-study in bike-shedding.

For those new to the term, it's effectively "The intensity of discussion is inversely proportional to the complexity of the problem". http://ftp.sunet.se/jargon/html/B/bikeshedding.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality

I don't know if I'd entirely call it bike-shedding; if they left it as a snowman, people would start to make comments like "Oh those unprofessional Rubyists, putting silly snowmans willy-nilly into code!"

Then again, they might not. But a check seems more 'professional.'

I agree with you on the end result, but I remember following the comments and discussion on GitHub when the changes were being made. It sure seemed like a big discussion over not much across several commits, and more thank 50 comments on GitHub alone.

Yeah, I saw nothing of that, so... you may certainly well be right.