On 2025-07-21 at 10:41, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 08:29:03AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote: > >> On 2025-07-21 at 07:02, Wouter Verhelst wrote: >>> The first exception would allow for things like quotes from Mein Kampf >>> in a fortunes-off package >> >> I infer from the context here that you are intending that the fact of >> being included in a package whose name marks it as containing >> potentially-offensive material would be the "appropriate context" >> referenced by the rule. (If that is not correct, then the next paragraph >> or two would not be applicable.) >> >> However, it would be easy to argue that when the Mein Kampf quotes are >> presented by a call to 'fortune -o' or 'fortune -a', they are presented >> without *any* context, and therefore are not being provided "in an >> appropriate context". > > Yes, good point. Let me reword the exception to say, > > "Quotes by historic people when either provided in an appropriate > content, or when behavior contrary to these policies was explicitly > requested." That looks mostly good to me. People might still try to argue that there's no explicit request involved in *the package itself*, or in including a particular quote therein, but I think that argument would be considerably harder to support. > This leaves the "by historic people" part of the exception, even to > fortunes-off packages. I don't think we should be having a policy that > basically allows discriminatory remarks by any Tom, Dick or Harry who > found their way to IRC at some point in the past to make it through this > or our regular code of conduct. Agreed. (Though some of the quotes already present in fortunes-off - including some, but certainly not all, of the ones even I might agree should be removed - come from what appear to be past Debian developers in IRC. That's not "any Tom, Dick, or Harry", but it's not far off either.) >>> or in a package that generally discusses the atrocities committed by >>> the Nazis and provides the quote for context; the second one would >>> allow things like religious texts or medieval literature. >> >> Would there be need to consider the definition of "historic" for these >> purposes? > > Not in my opinion, no. > > One thing I learned while drafting the original code of conduct is that > it's always OK, and sometimes sometimes beneficial, to be vague. > > If you make up rules of human behavior, there will always be a bit of a > gray zone where it is not clear whether something is allowed, according > to the rules, or not. You can never hope to eliminate that gray zone > completely; you can only make it asymptotically smaller. However, every > time you try to do so, there are two things that will happen: > - Your text gets larger and larger, until it gets unwieldy > - The chance increases of the rules outlawing something that should not > be outlawed, or not outlawing something that should be. > > Because of this, I think it is a better idea to have a definition that > uses terms that are generally understood while still having some leeway > in it. Fair, and agreed. I mostly wanted to make sure this detail, and its potential consequences, had been specifically considered; what you've now written seems to sufficiently indicate that it has. > The phrase "historic person" is generally understood to mean "a person > of note who lived some time ago". Plato is, today, a historic person. So > are Adolf Hitler, JFK, and Yassir Arafat. But my > great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Petrus Verhelst[1], is > not, because he was not "a person of note". The current US president, > whoever that is at the time of writing of a particular text, also not. I > don't know where the cutoff point is, and neither do you, and I think > that's a feature, not a bug. Agreed. >> Would that be a line that shifts forward as history progresses? Is >> there even an important value in the "historic" qualifier here, at >> least for the second exception, vs. letting that exception cover >> widely-disseminated texts more broadly? > > I think "widely-disseminated texts" also covers "memes", and just > because a racist text became a meme in some despicable Internet > subgroup doesn't mean we should accept it in Debian. True, though I would think that there would be other factors that would lead to its not being included. I'm holding back thoughts and possible concerns about a drawn line like that preventing the inclusion of a pithy quote (from the news, from IRC, or from wherever else) because it's too new to count as historic. I think in practice very few, if any, quotes which might come into consideration that way would also be close enough to the offensiveness boundary for this criterion to even be involved. (Some of the quotes in fortunes-off which come from past Debian developers in IRC, and must have been quite recent at the time the decision to add them to the package was made, do push close to that line. It's been quite a long while since the last of those was added, however, and it wouldn't be implausible if the types of discussions that produced them just aren't happening anymore.) -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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