All, 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*. It's very hard indeed to draw good conclusions as to what to do when everyone agrees that something could be done and disagrees with what that should be. 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. The single collection we have is largely a random collection from BSD of 1995 vintage, itself representative of one Unix site in 1995 or earlier. 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. PyPi has a fortunes-mod equivalent to read fortunes files: it doesn't necessarily include strfile but it will handle pre-existing fortune files. It should be open to anybody to make their own fortunes files - just as anyone can make a mix of their own music on their favourite music player. 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. This also means that anyone who wishes can add the *missing* content requested in the bugs over years into their own files at their own risk. Your thoughts, again, please. Andy Cater.
