[I'm using the pseudonymous respondent's message to reply to Mr. Cater
as well. Mind the angle brackets for quotation context.]
At 2022-11-23T14:14:38-0500, The Wanderer wrote:
On 2022-11-23 at 13:06, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
Thank you for your considered opinions thus far. We have various
developers who have written defending free speech: we've had others
who have expressed various reservations with one aspect or other of
the status quo.
There's been a grudging consensus that this is *hard*.
I gather that you don't join in that consensus, because your
prescriptions are quick and easy. Mr. Dowland's assessment of everyone
who wants his action reversed as being desirous of association with
racism, sexism, and pro-Nazi sentiment[1] is facile, hasty, and
fallacious.
Neither you nor he, therefore, is well placed to present a
(presumptively neutral) summary of the discussion. (Neither am I.)
Notably, Sam Hartman and Branden Robinson have pointed up flaws with
the existing categorisations and with a blanket removal based on preference. It's also noticeable that this largely comes down to consideration of fortunes in English - almost nothing has been said
about other fortunes files or other languages, though Sam talked
about cultural perceptions.
A serious suggestion: it is not necessary for Debian to package
fortune files at all.
I'm going to have to add "a serious suggestion" to "honestly" and "trust
me" as linguistic tags that flag a declaration as deceptive.
Have you worked on embedded systems, ever? It's not _necessary_ for
Debian to package much of anything. We could arguably serve just as
well as "universal OS" by providing only a nucleus, say, a high-quality microkernel.[2] Minimalism has never been an objective of the package
archive. This fact has been so transparently obvious for so long that
it is difficult for me to maintain the presumption that you are arguing
in good faith.
I find this suggestion demotivating and discouraging.
Sorry to hear that. My own reaction is better termed "pissed off".
I believe that this statement is inaccurate. There are parts of the collection which are Debian-specific (the earliest of which, per the changelog, were added in 1999), and others which have been added far
more recently than 1995 (there have been what seem like substantive
additions at least as recently as 2006).
Yes, some of them were collected by Joseph Carter ("knghtbrd"), a former
Debian developer, ca. 2000 and for some time afterward.
The way the Debian packaging splits the collection into various files,
which I understand is not necessarily done upstream, can also be
valuable.
I agree with this. If I were maintainer I think I'd thus segregate the
sort of mathy stuff I'd like to see, in acknowledgement that some people
just aren't edified or provoked to thought by such things. Similarly,
some people just aren't up to being randomly confronted by exemplars of
human folly, which characterizes the 1.5% or so of the fortunes-off
package at issue, even if they _type_ "fortune" at a shell prompt.
The upstream Github repository is potentially only one of many
disparate sites on the 'Net and the English language collection
doesn't reflect the languages of Debian users worldwide.
Is anyone being prevented from submitting fortune collections localized
to other languages? Several are already present.[3] Would you be able
to recognize a Hitler quote rendered in Cyrillic? Might such a quote
not carry context for a person with family who participated in the Great Patriotic War that you don't share? Perhaps some derogatory quip about
the inferiority of the Slavs, when Russians culturally well remember
hoisting the hammer and sickle over the Reichstag on 2 May 1945 (as my countryfolk do a similar event at Iwo Jima).
Your response, to exclude it all and _foreclose as a matter of policy_
the curation and maintenance of such resources amounts to declaring the
Debian Project impotent to address the challenges here.
It's my turn to cite §2.1.1 of the Debian Constitution as Steve Langasek
did to me. You are not _required_ to deal with fortune cookies. You
don't have to install them or use them. There are many packages that
any given user will never employ, or even be aware of.
The Project does not require your paternalistic supervision.
Remolding the archive to more closely resemble your personal corpus of installed packages is a curious way to serve the principles of plurality
and diversity.
If Debian doesn't distribute fortune files but instead provides the
means for users to make/download their own choice, nothing is lost.
Debian is not responsible for maintaining any file content, whether questionable or unobjectionable depending on viewpoint, and we lose
the burden of translation, maintenance and policing of content.
If you don't want these responsibilities, don't adopt them. Same goes
for Mr. Dowland.
I am reasonably certain that this would just lead to far fewer people bothering to make use of the fortunes database(s) at all, thereby
creating a self-fulfilling prophecy about how irrelevant this is in
the modern world.
The people who try to ban books in the United States employ a similar multi-level strategy. If censorship of the local public library's
collection is unsuccessful, they propose withdrawal of funds for the
library, removing a much greater volume of common resources from public facility.[4] No doubt to the satisfaction of the oligopolistic
publishing industry, which views public libraries as frustrating its
extraction of monopoly rents.[5]
From my perspective, this whole discussion looks like someone whom
I've respected coming in and proposing to take away one of the small
things I somewhat like having around, and that taking-away happening
almost immediately despite the existence of pushback over it, and then
that person reacting to the pushback by proposing to take away a
*bigger* thing that I even *more* like having around. I imagine it's
not hard to see how that could be upsetting or demotivating.
I have to disagree with Sam a bit here, while "be bold" is _often_ good
advice, especially in volunteer communities, it is not always. Apart
from the present contretemps, I can think of another (again from the
United States).[6]
Apparently the package's maintainer has not done an upload since
2013.[7] Even groff has managed to release twice since then![8]
I therefore solicit a volunteer who is fully up-to-date with packaging processes to privately advise me so that I can avoid making tedious
mistakes. E.g., I don't know if filing bugs against "wnpp" is still
necessary or recommended for adopting a package with nine years of
inattention. Please email me privately if you feel yourself qualified
and are supportive of my intended action. You don't need to be
enthusiastic about the package's _content_; I am not myself--there is a
lot of crap in there IMO, even apart from the stuff at issue here.
In the short run, my plan would be to ensure that the package is policy-compliant (and therefore can't be sniped again before release on
a technicality by some "deeply principled" person), evaluate the handful
of categories that are suggestive of group prejudice, and decide on some
kind of updated disclaimer (if necessary) so that the package can warn
about itself. In the years since fortunes-mod was first packaged for
Debian, the abbreviation "NSFW" has become commonly known for tagging of materials like this. That may be more communicative than an "-off"
suffix in the 2020s. But if a rename will frustrate the package's
progress through the incoming queue, I won't do it before the bookworm
release. The NSFW annotation can easily go in the package description.
In the long run, I expect to curate as suits me personally; I'll
document my actions (of course) and if someone wants to package the
items I throw away, that's up to them. One can expect the addition of
items reflecting my personal interests, like math, retrocomputing, music theory, and Catalan revolutionaries.
I don't have the desire or--especially--the time to undertake major
changes in the package before the bookworm release. I have something
else I'm working that brings me joy and I'd like to get that solid for
GNU release and thence into Debian. Approximately 400 upstream bugs
fixed--it does an old XFree86 package maintainer's heart good.[9][10]
Anyone who helps has my thanks in advance.
Regards,
Branden
[1]
https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2022/11/msg00062.html
[2] And do I ever have one in mind I'd like to tell people about! It
would please me much more than fighting over elementary principles
of open society.
[3]
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=fortunes
[4]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/24/michigan-library-defunded-gender-queer/
[5]
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/89038-over-the-past-25-years-the-big-publishers-got-bigger-and-fewer.html
[6] As usual, it was our conservo-glibertarian friends who were behind
this (q.v. "Free State Project").
"...At issue was the local school budget, which funds a school for
children through fourth grade in town and covers tuition for older
students to attend private and public schools in neighboring towns.
At a poorly attended annual meeting in March, voters approved a
measure to cut the school budget by more than half, from $1.7
million to $800,000.
The cut would have transformed the education system in Croydon,
replacing the public school system with one run by cheaper, private
companies that offer individualized programs, largely online.
Croydon would have become the first community in New Hampshire where
two companies, Prenda and Kaipod, would have become the default
education providers.
Both companies have been championed by New Hampshire Education
Commissioner Frank Edelblut, who helped them secure contracts with
the state of New Hampshire. ..."
https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2022-05-08/croydon-voters-overturn-school-budget-cut
[7]
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fortune-mod
[8]
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/groff/
[9]
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/ANNOUNCE
[10]
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/NEWS
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