Re: Bug#138541: ITP: debian-sanitize (was Re: inappropriate racist and other offensive material)
On Sun, Mar 17, 2002 at 03:11:06PM -0500, mdanish@andrew.cmu.edu wrote:
> Except that it's not granular enough: I can already pick out an easy example
> of Common Lisp programmers who hate emacs, love vim. And functional
> programmers in Haskell and SML who are the same way.
OK, so they form a constituency of "Functional Programmers who Use Vim".
Or go and join the existing vi group and persuade them to drop their
objections to functional programming.
Hey, that's politics.
> What one needs is a system that can be agreed upon objectively;
No, what one needs is a system that allows everyone who's got nothing
better to do than sit around passing moral judgements on other peoples'
efforts sit in their corner and make their judgements, but without
affecting everybody else.
There is already such a system. Anybody who wants to provide a cuss-free
Debian is free to set up aan archive which contains packages such as
bitchx-clean (bitchx minus the "bad" bits) which replaces, conflicts
with & provides bitchx. Or whatever.
The issue seems to be whether we should make it easier for people to
do this. One way we could do this would be to provide a package called
debian-censor (just so as to be clear what they're doing ;) ) which
asks the admin for a URL for a "ratings file". Where the admin gets
that ratings file from is up to them - they can get it from the
Christian Coalition, the FSF, the Tourette's Syndrome Fan Club or
wherever. It could even be possible to merge two such lists.
In fact, this could become quite a powerful way to select packages
in the first place - the GNOME people could provide a list that specifically
includes all the stuff that they like, the Christian Coalition could
provide a file that includes the bible-kjv-text but rejects unconditionally
anything that mentions sex, the Emacs people could provide a file that
unconditionally rejects vi and derivatives, the vi people could
unconditionally reject emacs and only mildly object to functional
programming, so that the strongly-rated inclusion of Common LISP by the
functional programmers could override it....
...in a sense, a beefed-up version of tasksel.
The file format should be simple enough that any fuckwit with too much
time on their hands can produce something "useful", and there we go.
Everybody happy.
--
Nick Phillips -- nwp@lemon-computing.com
Seriousness is in the eye of the beholder.
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