>>>>> "Andrew" == Andrew M A Cater <amaca...@einval.com> writes:
Andrew> All, Thank you for your considered opinions thus far. We
Andrew> have various developers who have written defending free
Andrew> speech: we've had others who have expressed various
Andrew> reservations with one aspect or other of the status quo.
Andrew> There's been a grudging consensus that this is *hard*. It's
Andrew> very hard indeed to draw good conclusions as to what to do
Andrew> when everyone agrees that something could be done and
Andrew> disagrees with what that should be.
Andrew> Notably, Sam Hartman and Branden Robinson have pointed up
Andrew> flaws with the existing categorisations and with a blanket
Andrew> removal based on preference. It's also noticeable that this
Andrew> largely comes down to consideration of fortunes in English -
Andrew> almost nothing has been said about other fortunes files or
Andrew> other languages, though Sam talked about cultural
Andrew> perceptions.
I think Debian has a standard approach for dealing with these sorts of
hard issues: leave it up to the maintainer.
I think you'd need a much stronger consensus than you could show today
to do anything else.
So, I have an alternative:
This is not a project-level decision.
Whoever is maintaining fortune should take this discussion as input and
maintain the packages.
If we don't like how they are doing that, we use our normal mechanisms
(TC and GR) to override them.
If you want to maintain fortune-mod and remove all the fortunes, go do
that.
But don't be surprised if someone else wants to maintain a version with
fortunes.
Andrew> A serious suggestion: it is not necessary for Debian to
Andrew> package fortune files at all.
It is not necessary, but as I discussed in my long message about
removing software from Debian, removing creative content from Debian has
a chilling effect.
Even if you write a downloader, so all I have to do is type
fortune-install really-disgusting-insensitive-stuff
then it's still less accessible than if I can type apt install
whatever:
* It's not on our mirrors
* It's not on our media
And as I discussed in my DebConf talk [1], that sort of access matters.
Not everyone has internet connectivity.
[1]:
https://debconf20.debconf.org/talks/32-when-we-virtualize-the-whole-internet/
What you propose is a very community team compromise: let us remove the
things that make us uncomfortable.
And when those things are not core to our mission, that's often a
reasonable approach.
Especially when I consider the precident this creates, I consider this
suggestion an escalation.
I do not support it.
I think it compromises the freedoms I said I care about.
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