Re: Should the weboob package stay in Debian?
Thanks Marc for raising this on -devel. I am the person who originally
brought attention to the package on -private. I did so there, because
I did not feel confident in doing so in a public space initially. It
wasn't my intention to irritate upstream by talking behind their back,
so I'm sorry for that.
On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 02:35:18PM +0100, Matthew Vernon wrote:
I think the names contribute to a "laddish" environment where sexual
objectification of women can be seen to be OK, and that this is
something we should try and avoid in Debian. I say this without
implying any malign intent on the authors part - they've been named
thus for some time now, and what was once considered OK is not
necessarily still considered OK (that's progress!).
I'm quoting this part because I think it's an excellent summary of the
problem.
I think it would be good if the names were changed.
I think we ought to more concretely determine what changes we wish to
take place. To do this properly I need to spend more time looking at the
package in more detail, so what follows is just my initial feelings. I
welcome feedback. For now I suggest we hash it out in mail, let's see
how well this works. We may have to consider something more structured
such as debating over a concrete PR, or a DEP proposal.
As a pre-amble side-note, some issues of offending users with homophobic
language have been addressed upstream, and I think we should aim to
carry these patches in stable/testing/unstable. (I don't think we have
processes for patching oldstable or o-o-stable, please correct me if I'm
wrong. I also haven't yet verified that these patches are necessary in
all of our suites.)[1]
My ideal outcome is that we come to an agreement on a series of steps
that results in the software *upstream* no longer objectifying women, and
we continue to carry the software in Debian, and that in doing so
both upstream and Debian benefit (it *is* useful software).
A less ideal outcome, but still acceptable from my POV, would be that
upstream make no changes, but we carry patches in Debian to address the
issue. This is, of course, so long as we have maintainers willing to do
that. Since I raised the objection, I am prepared to volunteer towards
that effort, should it be necessary, and for what little that's worth.
So some of the changes then:
The software has a long established name "weboob" which is an acronym of
sorts for "web outside of browsers". Whether or not the acronym was ever
chosen to allude to breasts in the first place, I don't know. The
software has a domain name weboob.org which is their established home on
the Internet and WWW. Changing the entire project name I think would be
impractical and impose real costs on upstream (e.g. new domain
registration(s)). If it was crystal clear that this name was
deliberately offensive then I would argue that this should happen
non-the-less, but IMHO at least, it's not, and I think the issues with
weboob itself, in isolation, can be addressed simply by adding a hyphen.
I propose, that the package name in Debian grows a hyphen: web-oob. The
placement is consistent with the acronym (web is not an acronym, it's a
full word, the rest is an acronym), the coincidence (or not) with "boob"
is at least disguised. It's close enough to the old name to preserve
word-of-mouth, awareness of the tool, search engines finding it, etc. I
would be very encouraged if upstream were to consider this, too.
The binary names within are far more problematic. A full enumeration of
the ones that IMHO must change will have to wait for a follow-up email.
But it would certainly include "wetboobs", "boobsize", "boobtracker" and
"flatboob". If the names are to change, I don't think there's any reason
they should not change significantly; merely adding a hyphen would not
be sufficient. I will attempt to suggest some names in a follow-up.
A technical drawback of changing names may be that scripts reference the
older names break. More work to be done on this proposal is to determine
to which programs this is likely to be an issue. Should it be an issue,
then I do not object to the offensive names being provided as
compatibility symlinks, so long as they are shipped in a separate binary
package, using the already-established practice of suffixing
"-offensive" to the binary package name.
I'll stop here for now, plenty to discuss already.
[1] https://git.weboob.org/weboob/devel/merge_requests/228
--
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⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Jonathan Dowland
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