Re: inappropriate racist and other offensive material
Ben Collins wrote:
Again, there is no excuse for racism in Debian. Other packages have
elided the inappropriate material in the past, as they should. An IRC
client has no business being racist. Debian is a distribution that
specifically caters to children; note the debian-junior project. As it
stands, your package is inappropriate to be on the box my daughter uses.
IMO, the correct decision would be for the Debian Jr. meta package to
conflict with anything that may be offensive. We have things like the
anarchy docs, bitchx, sex, etc. etc. etc.
Hopefully this was meant at least partially as a joke ? Removing
anything that may be
offensive from the Debian Jr meta package would make the package empty.
I.e. "man ls"
gives:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LS(1) FSF LS(1)
NAME
ls - list directory contents
SYNOPSIS
ls [OPTION]... [FILE]...
DESCRIPTION
List information about the FILEs (the current directory by
default). Sort entries alphabetically if none of -cftuSUX
nor --sort.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hey!! Someone wrote SUX in the man page to ls, surely ls must be removed.
Trying to keep debian politically correct is going to take a lot of work
since what
is PC is constantly changing. Once "negro" was not considered derogatory
but that
soon changed. Then "black" was not considered derogatory for a while (and it
still isn't if the person using the term has this skin color), later
"black" was deemed
unacceptable and "african american" became PC, but after a while this
also became
unacceptable etc etc..
Perhaps debian should have a PC package much like the the i18l packages and
all packages should do substitutions of person descriptions, i.e. a part
of the
implementation could be:
if (get_user_nationality(getuid()) == FROM_NEW_ZEALAND) {
s/INHABITANT_OF_NZ/kiwi/
} else {
s/INHABITANT_OF_NZ/fine new zealandish individual/
}
Enough rambling. Just to say that what one person person considers
acceptable, another
is sure to call offensive or racism - this problem can not be solved by
censoring debian
packages but only by teaching openness and teaching how to distinguish
humor from
racism as already suggested by several people in this thread.
/Gandalf
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