Re: Should the weboob package stay in Debian?
19 juillet 2018 17:15 "Jonathan Dowland" <jmtd@debian.org> a écrit:
> 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.
>
I like this idea :-)
> 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'm wondering, wouldn't renaming the package be a solution there too ? Based on the examples set by the packages fortunes-*off, wouldn't "web-oob-off", "web-oob-qt-off", "python-web-oob" and "python-web-oob-core" be a way to solve this problem ?
For the people sensitive to this kind of material, I guess we don't want them to read the whole package description before realizing that this is not something they would want to use. So I guess the package descriptions would have to be changed as well to explain immediately the "-off" part before explaining anything else.
It would allow keeping the same content, keeping it compatible with upstream.
I'm asking because I'm currently considering writing an application that would use Web-oob, and anything that would break the compatibility could obviously make my life harder.
> I'll stop here for now, plenty to discuss already.
>
> [1] https://git.weboob.org/weboob/devel/merge_requests/228
>
> --
> ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
> ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Jonathan Dowland
> ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://jmtd.net
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