Re: Why "daemon" is not like "deity"
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On 4 Mar 1998, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> bruce> Rest assured, the developers don't want to show religious
> bruce> intolerance if they can avoid it by changing a single word.
>
> But is it religous intolerance? So far, I have just seen your
> word on that. Is anyone's religious sensibility actually hurt?
Despite my personal feelings on the subject of naming, I am forced to
agree with Bruce. Most of the Judao-Christian variants make a big deal
about not having any other higher powers around, and many of the people
I've met who take this kind of thing seriously also have a problem with
names, so to speak.
In other words, yes, I think that having a program called Deity as
part of the primary system toolkit is going to cause problems. It might
not *offend* most of the affected, per se, but it is likely to make a lot
of people uncomfortable, and I don't think that's a good thing. People
should be comfortable with Debian.
As a side issue (this part meant with a little bit of humor, folks),
some of us aren't going to like having Deity on our systems because it
competes with US! On My System, I *AM* God -- I control the software
placed onto it, I tell it when to activate and when not to (it doesn't
always obey, but software that troubles me consistently I tend to punish
with the staff of rm -- a distant relative of the staff of Zot for those
familiar). I can just see it now. A small cult of hackers in Oregon (I'm
picking on Oregon for no good reason, here) installs the latest version of
Debian, realize that they have to invoke Deity, and in a staunch fit of
refusing to accept competition, destroy the rival deity by installing
Redhat, and end up lost in the mists of the data forest forever (I'm
picking on Redhat for no good reason here, except that I'm still a little
sore at them for releasing an upgrade that trashed my system).
Personally, I have enough pagan roots that it doesn't bother me.
Hermes was a deity, but he was still Zeus' messenger boy, if I recall
correctly.
The discussion of whether or not the Sysadmin really exists is left as
an exercise to the reader (or alternately, you can e-mail me for a copy --
it's a really fun treatise).
> I still think the person who wrote Deity is the only one who
> gets to decide what it is called.
An interesting question, that. Typically, yes, the author should have
naming rights. But we've renamed packages before, when such names would
cause current or future problems with Debian (i.e. the entire namespace
pollution debate). That implies that as a collective, Debian can rename
things to protect itself, and this may fall into that category.
=============================================================================
Zed Pobre <zcp@po.cwru.edu> | PGP key on servers, fingerprint on finger
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* Who actually liked "Deity", and now dislikes "Trove". Yes, I waffle.
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