Re: inappropriate racist and other offensive material
On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 15:52, 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.
Um, ew? That would mean that people that wanted the meta package to
install the children's software would be forced to have a separate
install for the parents (if they needed/wanted conflicting packages).
If it is decided that conflicts in packages should be used in the Debian
Jr. project, why not have a separate, debian-jr-anti-offensive (or,
likely, something a little shorter) package that has these conflicts.
Then, I could install a package to get the edutainment packages for my
theoretical children, and still have fortunes-off installed (because I,
like many others, have a sense of humor, and can laugh at jokes even
targeted for my race/religion/ethnicity/social class/profession/eye
color/beverage of choice/dog's name/etc.)
>
> Don't start a trend that we cannot stick to. Unless you really feel like
> perusing the sources of everything (grep -ir fuck in the kernel source),
> you should drop this now. Yes it sucks. Yes, a lot of people disagree
> with such remarks, but freedom comes in many forms (including allowing
> people to speak such nasty remarks).
Well, assuming that Debian Jr. itself doesn't cause a conflict, and
there is a separate package to do the conflicting, then it wouldn't
matter if people agree or not. Those that do can install the conflicts
package, those that don't can ignore it.
The remaining issue then would be splitting packages into non-offensive
and offensive versions. Of course, then, you'd have to figure out what
is offensive. Perhaps the only way you'll manage is that is with a real
vote (and not mickey mouse web votes where any intelligent geek can vote
400 times in the course of a day). Even then, it's up to the package
maintainers to do the actual splits.
People need to realize that Debian isn't like RedHat or M$ where we have
to cater to the corporate/classy clients, who expect there to be no
jokes, humor, or especially offensive material, in their OS (because the
business culture seems to work that way, for some reason). If people
want an OS that was designed to be "professional" (in the suit sense of
the term), Debian (or even Linux/UNIX in general) isn't going to be it.
>
>
>
> Ben
>
> --
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>
>
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