On Sun, Mar 17, 2002 at 02:07:01AM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote: > On Sun, 2002-03-17 at 00:45, Steve Langasek wrote: > > On Sat, Mar 16, 2002 at 04:52:19PM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote: > > > True. Unfortunately, when you're talking about something as subjective > > > as offense, there aren't many good classification systems that won't > > > themselves be offensive to someone. Democratic vote strikes me as one > > > of the few that's hard to challenge. > > Who, then, becomes the target audience for such a package? How can > > users tell if this package is something they want if all they know is > > that it measures how much stuff offends Debian Developers? Bad code > > offends Debian Developers; broken licenses offend Debian Developers. By > > and large, swear words do not offend Debian Developers. > I'm envisioning the target audience for the package to be people who > want some kind of vetting of the content of packages, but who don't have > the time to do the research themselves. This might include less > technically-minded parents or corporate and government sysadmins. To > these people, "taking our word for it" is better than no vetting at all. > As I've mentioned in another message, I'm not interested in targeting > swear words or mild stuff. I'm hoping that this will catch packages > with highly offensive stuff, like the joke mentioned in this thread. > The point of the voting system is that a package would have to contain > something really bad before it would get onto a list like this. OTOH, you've also said that you will abandon the experiment if developers don't get it, which implies that there's yet another set of criteria being used to measure the success of the project, above and beyond developer votes. I'm always in favor of tools that give users more information, and this tool definitely fits into this category -- /if done right/. A blacklist that's assembled with respect to a publically available list of measurable criteria would be useful to many people. Those who agree with the criteria benefit from having a package they can use on their systems. Those who agree with /some/ of the criteria benefit by having a list available that they can check against. Those who believe that censorship of the archive is wrong benefit from being able to placate those who hold a different view. Using voting to determine membership in the blacklist, however, lends a faux legitimacy to this package that it cannot and should not have. There should be nothing morally authoritative about such a package. If you say "these are the packages that contain homophobic jokes about Hindu bitch-cows from the Bible belt", users can decide up front whether to take it or leave it. If you say "these are the packages that are allowed to exist in the Debian archive, but that 8 out of 10 Debian developers believe are morally wrong", the only people you benefit are those who are willing to subvert their own moral judgement in favor of that of the Debian community -- and THAT offends /me/ more than anything else that's been discussed in this thread so far. > Up to now, censorship has been a matter of the developer's choice, and > is thus exposed to the wrath of offended users. Since users have no > recourse other than by harassing the package maintainer, you end up with > developers self-censoring (before the fact, even) to relieve or avoid > the pressure. I don't want to take power over a package away from a > developer, though; rather, I'd like to divert the users' wrath away, so > the developer can make choices about the package that aren't based on > relieving peer pressure. The types of users who would rather harrass developers to change their packages than simply remove the package from their own systems aren't going to go away under your plan. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
Attachment:
pgpcCRScb4uwx.pgp
Description: PGP signature