Fortunes-off - do we need this as a package for Bookworm?
All,
This is in the context of a mail to the Community Team raising a query about
fortunes-off - the fortune cookie database that contains offensive fortunes.
The specific query was about Nazi quotes from someone in Europe - I don't
believe our database currently contains these, as they were purged from the
BSD package from which ours is derived but I would be prepared to be very
wrong here.
The point was made that if the database did contain Nazi quotes / a swastika
it might make it illegal to host the content on mirrors in at least Germany
or Austria.
The database dates back to 1997 or so - I note one of the upstream maintainers
from around that time (Amy Lewis) having concerns about fortunes-offensive
categories.
This database contains some quotes categories that probably don't fit in with
our Debian values or general societal values 25 years on - ethnic, homophobia
and a few others.
This does raise the wider question: we're about to freeze for Bookworm.
Removing leaf packages and packages with a small user count might be profitable
at this point. Fortune-mod has some bugs at the moment preventing testing
transition and has had several NMUs prior to the latest upload.
Would it be a good idea to at least remove fortunes-off and the corresponding
data file for Bookworm at this point and going forwards?
It saves a tiny amount of space and a few translations and represents a small
simplification of Debian at minimal cost.
We don't have to ship the whole world of data just because it's available: if
anyone wants to package their own collections of fortune quotes for themselves, the instructions are readily available to do so on the 'Net.
Your thoughts, please.
Reply to: