On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 06:55:03PM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
[...]
> More cogently: where are we going to get our fortunes from - where's the
> canonical source now that FreeBSD has gone?
>
> Who is going to take responsibility for checking quotes and translations
> in all languages and dealing with requests for additions and deletions?
I think this is for the maintainer to decide, not the project. We don't
require any particular type of authorship for any other package, and
there have been multiple instances of packages where the Debian
maintainer has taken over upstream maintenance (including, occasionally,
the NBD software, where the "Debian maintainer" turned out to be me). I
don't see why the contents of the fortunes package should be any
different?
> [Each language should have the full quota of quotes where feasible - compare
> the Debian installer or the wiki - no language should be inferior as far
> as this is possible]
>
> If it is the package maintainer, is this an appropriate burden for a package
> on which others may judge the project as a whole, rightly or wrongly?
As long as the maintainer replies to reasonable bug reports, and as long
as packages that contain things which "might offend" (etc) are clearly
marked as such? Yes, I think so.
[...]
> if you really want the Project to continue with this package / these
> packages, may I suggest a straightforward series of small changes?
>
> * Make the fortunes package a reader for fortune-format files.
> * Add a doc package detailing how to create the valid format of files that
> fortune as a program will read. How to form a fortune from arbitrary text.
> * Debian as a whole stops shipping fortune formatted files and lets users
> compose or download/translate their own fortune databases.
>
> There's no censorship of files/thought/speech
I don't think this is a good way forward.
As someone who used to run fortune in his shell initialiation files for
a very long time, the value of having fortune installed is to learn new
things, or gain new insights, based on the quotes of famous people. You
lose that advantage if you have to maintain your own fortune database.
If we stop shipping fortune files, we might as well stop shipping
the fortune program altogether.
(as an aside, the file format is ridiculously easy -- create a plain
text file with quotes separated by percent ("%") characters on a single
line. You're done)
--
w@uter.{be,co.za}
wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}
I will have a Tin-Actinium-Potassium mixture, thanks.
