Thanks Marc for raising this on -devel. I am the person who originally brought attention to the package on -private. I did so there, because I did not feel confident in doing so in a public space initially. It wasn't my intention to irritate upstream by talking behind their back, so I'm sorry for that.
On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 02:35:18PM +0100, Matthew Vernon wrote:
I think the names contribute to a "laddish" environment where sexual objectification of women can be seen to be OK, and that this is something we should try and avoid in Debian. I say this without implying any malign intent on the authors part - they've been named thus for some time now, and what was once considered OK is not necessarily still considered OK (that's progress!).
I'm quoting this part because I think it's an excellent summary of the problem.
I think it would be good if the names were changed.
I think we ought to more concretely determine what changes we wish to take place. To do this properly I need to spend more time looking at the package in more detail, so what follows is just my initial feelings. I welcome feedback. For now I suggest we hash it out in mail, let's see how well this works. We may have to consider something more structured such as debating over a concrete PR, or a DEP proposal. As a pre-amble side-note, some issues of offending users with homophobic language have been addressed upstream, and I think we should aim to carry these patches in stable/testing/unstable. (I don't think we have processes for patching oldstable or o-o-stable, please correct me if I'm wrong. I also haven't yet verified that these patches are necessary in all of our suites.)[1] My ideal outcome is that we come to an agreement on a series of steps that results in the software *upstream* no longer objectifying women, and we continue to carry the software in Debian, and that in doing so both upstream and Debian benefit (it *is* useful software). A less ideal outcome, but still acceptable from my POV, would be that upstream make no changes, but we carry patches in Debian to address the issue. This is, of course, so long as we have maintainers willing to do that. Since I raised the objection, I am prepared to volunteer towards that effort, should it be necessary, and for what little that's worth. So some of the changes then: The software has a long established name "weboob" which is an acronym of sorts for "web outside of browsers". Whether or not the acronym was ever chosen to allude to breasts in the first place, I don't know. The software has a domain name weboob.org which is their established home on the Internet and WWW. Changing the entire project name I think would be impractical and impose real costs on upstream (e.g. new domain registration(s)). If it was crystal clear that this name was deliberately offensive then I would argue that this should happen non-the-less, but IMHO at least, it's not, and I think the issues with weboob itself, in isolation, can be addressed simply by adding a hyphen. I propose, that the package name in Debian grows a hyphen: web-oob. The placement is consistent with the acronym (web is not an acronym, it's a full word, the rest is an acronym), the coincidence (or not) with "boob" is at least disguised. It's close enough to the old name to preserve word-of-mouth, awareness of the tool, search engines finding it, etc. I would be very encouraged if upstream were to consider this, too. The binary names within are far more problematic. A full enumeration of the ones that IMHO must change will have to wait for a follow-up email. But it would certainly include "wetboobs", "boobsize", "boobtracker" and "flatboob". If the names are to change, I don't think there's any reason they should not change significantly; merely adding a hyphen would not be sufficient. I will attempt to suggest some names in a follow-up. A technical drawback of changing names may be that scripts reference the older names break. More work to be done on this proposal is to determine to which programs this is likely to be an issue. Should it be an issue, then I do not object to the offensive names being provided as compatibility symlinks, so long as they are shipped in a separate binary package, using the already-established practice of suffixing "-offensive" to the binary package name. I'll stop here for now, plenty to discuss already. [1] https://git.weboob.org/weboob/devel/merge_requests/228 -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Jonathan Dowland ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://jmtd.net ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Please do not CC me, I am subscribed to the list.