RE: Obscene content in cygwin file.

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2005, Gary R. Van Sickle wrote:

> > Most agree that it's a packaging bug in fortune, and that the
> > limericks file should be renamed limericks-o and ROT13'd.
> > End of discussion.
>
> Nononono, don't you try to force your end-of-discussion values on ME!

Heh...  On most other messages you at least leave a name of the person
you're quoting.  Here, I actually had to *read* your reply to figure out
it was me.  What's the world coming to? ;-)

> I agree that at a minimum, the obfuscation you describe is absolutely
> required.  However, I'd like an answer to a question which I raised with a
> different poster:  What's the reason to provide this profanity at all in the
> Cygwin distro?  To the best of my knowledge, there are no Cygwin
> X-screensavers loaded with obfuscated pornographic pictures.  I can't
> imagine one being accepted were it to be proposed by somebody.  But dirty
> limericks get the green light?  Why?
>
> But, in the intrest of the desire of many here to have their porn and
> limericks too, I offer this new constructive vote category suggestion:
>
> "[ ]  I demand more filth!  Add a new "Porn" category to Setup!"

Sure.  No problem.  Go for it.  As long as it's in Debian, it's fine...
];->

> Frankly, I'd think just pulling the off-color material is the easiest
> solution from a legal, moral, technical, and argumentological standpoint.

IMHO (and, since I'm not the maintainer of the fortune package, this is
indeed a HO), the "right" solution is whatever's easiest to the fortune
maintainer in terms of time, both current (doing the work) and future
(maintaining the package with respect to future upstream changes).  This
would imply not splitting the package, cutting out pieces of the package,
etc, since those just add extra work at later stages.

The "obscene" material was not supposed to be seen without special action
on the part of the user (as documented in the man page).  It was seen
without such action, due to a packaging bug.  The bug should be fixed --
period.  However, if some package you maintain contained a bug (e.g.,
buffer overrun) that made it garble, say, its normal help output, and that
new output accidentally contained "f**k" (or some other "obscene"
terminology) -- would you argue for removing the help output, or would you
simply go and fix the bug?  Granted, the analogy's a bit stretched, but
it's the best I can come up with at 1:30am.
	Igor
-- 
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