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On 2025-07-17 at 06:18, Marc Haber wrote:
On Thu, 17 Jul 2025 11:47:36 +0200, Salvo Tomaselli
<[email protected]> 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
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