On Sat, Mar 16, 2002 at 12:12:57AM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote: > Package: wnpp > Severity: wishlist > > Various people have argued on debian-devel: > > >>people, you have to understand that at a government facility all of our > > >>traffic can be monitored and we can be held responsible for its content. I > > >>like the Debian distribution alot but without a policy statement it simply > > >>won't be worth the risk when I can use another distribution that is more > > >>careful about its content. I also don't have the time to look at every > > >>message that comes out of every package. As I said, the practical solution > > >>is that I will rely on the social contract. > > >The long term trend of this is that repressive governments will damage > > >their countries by blocking access to technology and governments that are > > >more liberal will benefit. > > I disagree. Governments are much like businesses in this respect - they > > must establish some sort of standard of behavior within government > > facilities just like a business generally wants a standard of behavior > > followed by its employees (such as not surfing the web for porn at work). > > A government can regulate itself without repressing the populace in > > general. That's how it is in my country anyway :-) > Perhaps a compromise is needed - something that can provide people > with a content filter of sorts, while allowing us to package whatever > we feel we need to. > So, I propose to upload debian-sanitize. > The basic idea is that debian-sanitize will Conflict: with packages > deemed to be offensive. With this package installed, therefore, > offensive packages will not be installed without the admin's explicit > consent. > As an option, we could use some less absolute method of determining > offense, perhaps something like vrms. > Generating the list of offensive packages is, of course, the hard > part. I propose we do this with the following process. It has the > advantages of not (necessarily) promoting the biases of one developer > or group. I object to using any subjective method (such as popular vote) for determining which packages should be conflicted with in such a package. There should be clear, objective criteria -- fully stated in the package description, if possible -- explaining why the conflicted packages have been chosen. Users should be able to make informed decisions about whether the conflicted packages are ones that should be removed from their systems. In addition, if you use the simple criterion of having Debian developers indicate whether they find a given package offensive, I think the only two packages you'll get a majority of developers to say they find offensive are vi and emacs. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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