On 2025-07-17 at 06:18, Marc Haber wrote: > On Thu, 17 Jul 2025 11:47:36 +0200, Salvo Tomaselli > <tipos...@tiscali.it> wrote: > >> since you agreed to it I will reply publicly. >> >>> Thank you for your open words and for all the work you’ve put >>> into this package. I understand that it’s frustrating when you >>> feel your effort isn’t fully recognized or valued. I want to >>> reassure you: your contributions are appreciated. I believe many >>> of us see and respect the dedication behind your work, even if we >>> sometimes fail to express it clearly. >> >> Sorry, but these are empty words. >> >> Letting something be for 20 years and then using the community and >> release team hammers on me after 2 years of work is a power abuse >> (and the opposite of welcoming community). If it had to be done it >> had to be done immediately when I adopted the package or before. >> Now it's too late. > > I think that we old farts need to accept that the world has changed > and the project has changed and that things that used to be okay 20, > maybe even 10 years ago are not ok any more. Love it or leave it.
My personal problem with the whole thing is (at least in part): Many of the contents of these packages are not in fact offensive (in the sense of violating the modern standards of acceptability to which you refer), despite the package being labeled as "offensive". The line being drawn of removing the entire package appears to be based on nothing more than that label being on the package. What that label means is not "the contents of this package are offensive", but rather "some people might find the contents of this package offensive". I happen to still have the fortunes-off package itself installed, and based on this thread, have begun reviewing it to see what parts of its contents might actually be offensive by any serious standard. So far, I've identified a few definites and a handful of borderline cases (the latter basically all IRC quotes from the username Overfiend), but the large majority of entries that I've looked at thus far appear to have no better reason for being in the "offensive" section than that they include the use of words like "shit" or "fuck". That can be reason enough to exclude them from being shown in contexts which might be visible to children, or at a workplace, but I seriously doubt that it would rise to the level of offensiveness which would warrant removal from Debian - even by the standards of those who are demanding the unilateral, wholesale removal of the entire package, without review of the actual package contents, and indeed *in the face of* pushback from Salvo (who *has* apparently been doing such review, at least for other languages). The existence of the '-o' and '-a' options to fortune, and of the fortunes-off* packages, appears to me to represent an attempt to divide potential fortunes into three categories: A: Ones which have no reasonable objectionability at all, ever. (This does of course turn on the definition of "reasonable".) B: Ones which would not be suitable for some contexts, but which one would not want to have shown in other contexts. (What contexts these are could of course warrant discussion.) C: Ones which should be excluded entirely. The existence of three categories provides valuable fudge-factor room; there will very often be potential fortunes which clearly would not fall into category A, but also seem hard to argue should fall into category C. Having category B available in the middle gives a third option for use in those cases, and makes it much easier to argue that in cases where the decision between A and B or B and C is still hard to decide, the candidate should be placed in the more-excluded of the two. Potential fortunes which fall into category C can, and should, be dropped from the -off packages. Requiring that the packages themselves be dropped, however, effectively requires omitting the entirety of category B - thus requiring that everything that would not clearly fit into category A be omitted, despite the wide range of potential opinions about where to draw the line at the edge of that category. I think that's going farther than is warranted, or indeed can really be justified. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
