Our menu needs & arguments against a rating system
On Sat, Dec 02, 2000 at 10:50:53AM +0100, joost witteveen wrote:
> Currently I see no reason to create a debian-jr-menu package.
The only argument in favour of a debian-jr-menu package is that it
centralizes the menu decisions into a single spot where we can see them
and change them all at once. The potential fan-out for this project, in
terms of sheer number of packages we will have to touch every time we
change our minds about something, is frightening.
> That was what I intended to say: the menu file I showed was not
> from the menu package, but from debian-jr (or debian-rating, or whatever).
Well, a "rating" package is not exactly what I had in mind. Although it
is a possibility for future consideration, it is not an immediate need.
My primary concerns are:
1. A menu system organized to make sense for children, with things
grouped together around concrete terms that are from a child's world.
A menu is an abstraction already, so this may be an exercise in
futility, but we will do the best we can.
2. A menu system that includes a comprehensive set of things that
children will use and that omits things that they will not use.
Aside from these goals, everything else is icing. I expect parents and
administrators of systems to judge for themselves among those packages
that are questionable what to put on and what to leave off. I expect very
few things will fall in that category, so building infrastructure to
support it is not a priority.
> > Where e-rating rates the educational value, and e-area is the area of
> > educational benefit a child can gain from the program (in this case,
>
> Find with me -- I only intend to provide the menu infrastructure;
> whatever you cal the tags is up to debian-jr
Now we are discussing what a school system might need in a rating system.
I'm not sure I want us to do this work. I'd rather see this sort of
rating handled on a larger scale by an organization with a clearer mandate
than ours for putting Linux into educational institutions, like SEUL/edu.
I think a website/database is probably a much better place to keep this
sort of information rather than burying it in the bowels of the Debian
package management system.
> Oh, and one other note. I personally think that the
> x-ranting (sex) , v-rating (violence), e-rating (education)
> are usefull genereally, not just for debian-jr.
And not just for Debian. If a third party body compiles a database of
ratings, we should build hooks into Debian to retrieve and make use of
those ratings. Designing it into Debian at this point, without such a
body of committed individuals who will be doing the ratings, is premature.
> On any system, there may well be religious people,
> that could be very offended by x-rated programs; or
> others that don't want to see the violent programs.
> It's not just children that might use this info.
> That's why I proposed to put the information in
> debian-rating.
Any group with this concern and a sufficient number of installed Debian
systems to warrant doing the work of creating a -rating package should
therefore launch their rating project and then file a wishlist bug for us
to package it so those ratings can be applied to Debian.
With Debian Jr's primary consumers being Debian developers & users with
children, they are likely going to just trust our judgement that anything
installed by "task-debian-jr" is going to be suitable for children, and
those packages which are included that there is any question about, such
as Mozilla, are going to be clearly annotated in our documentation. The
concerns are better covered in detail there with pros & cons presented
rather than trying to sum up our judgements about those packages in
something as arbitrary as a number in a rating system.
Ben
--
nSLUG http://www.nslug.ns.ca synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca
Debian http://www.debian.org synrg@debian.org
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