svn commit: r201477 - head/games/fortune/datfiles

[Carlos A. M. dos Santos]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Carlos A. M. dos Santos wrote:
[...]
>> Five to ten years from now that quotation will
>> be just history, like the ones from/about JFK, Richard Nixon, and
>> Spiro Agnew.
>
> Actually there are several things in the main fortunes file that I
> find offensive related to political stuff of the 60's and 70's
> (although not for the reasons that I think most people would find them
> offensive). Note, I am not however suggesting that we do a wholesale
> move of potentially offensive stuff.

Have somebody *ever* complained about this? Is there any PR asking
that offensive stuff be removed from the default fortunes file? If
not, you are overzealously attempting to solve a non-existing problem.

>> Are you whiling to apply such rule to all supposedly
>> political fortunes?
>
> My very first post on this was, "Anything that may offend someone
> belongs in fortunes-o, and all political commentary belongs in this
> category."

All business is based on the mutual trust of one of the parts.
		-- Poul Henningsen [1894-1967]
Verdict: offensive to businessmen

Women are always anxious to urge bachelors to matrimony; is it
from charity, or revenge?
		-- Gustave Vapereau
Verdict: sexist

It's the same old story; boy meets beer, boy drinks beer...
boy gets another beer.
		-- Cheers
Verdict: offensive to young men (and to alcoholics)

It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.
Verdict: offensive to elders

There is not much to choose between a woman who deceives
us for another, and a woman who deceives another for ourselves.
		-- Augier
Verdict: sexist

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
they have to take you in.
		-- Robert Frost, "The Death of the Hired Man"
Verdict: offensive to the concepts of family and home

And so on.

> FWIW, while I am definitely in favor of treating all people with
> courtesy and respect,  I am just about as
> anti-mindless-political-correctness as you can possibly be. In fact,
> in both my .bashrc and my xscreensaver config I use fortune -a because
> as much as some of the things in there offend me, I find it refreshing
> to be challenged by other viewpoints. OTOH, I am also in favor of us
> building a professional-quality operating system, and while I actually
> _voiced_ my objection to the removal of
> "die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog" because that is not something that is
> user-visible

Fortune is also not visible unless explicitly invoked by the user. It
is not invoked by the default /etc/csh.cshrc, /etc/csh.login or
/etc/profile. Moreover, the skeleton .login and .profile files, in
/usr/src/share/skel, invoke "fortune freebsd-tips", which is pretty
much harmless.

> I think that if we SAY there is a distinction between
> fortunes and fortunes-o that we ought to follow through on that.

Too late. See the verdicts above. And you are aiming an impossible
goal. People can feel offended by almost anything.

> Putting something that we know could (and almost certainly will) be
> found offensive in the fortunes file because WE are smarter and more
> sophisticated than those fools who would be offended by it is
> childish, foolish, and unprofessional.

The only possible solution would be creating a custom BSD, the "Boring
Software Distribution":

     # cd /usr/src
     # echo WITHOUT_GAMES=1 >> /etc/src.conf
     # make love (yes, FreeBSD's make knows how to make love!)
     # make buildworld
     # ...

>        Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
>                        -- Pablo Picasso

As a computer scientist and software developer, I feel irremediably
offended by this quotation. ;-)

-- 
My preferred quotation of Robert Louis Stevenson is "You cannot
make an omelette without breaking eggs". Not because I like the
omelettes, but because I like the sound of eggs being broken.