Re: Let's CENSOR it! (was: Uploaded anarchism 7.5-1 (source all) to master)
As most of you already know, I am deeply opposed to censorship. Having
said that, I don't think this is really about censorship, but about what
we "allow" to go into the distribution. This leaves me with two things to
say:
1. Whether or not a package is going to be created has always been left up
to the developer who wishes to create the package. Only recently have we
become more insistant about "intent to package" notices, and even then
these are usually only desired to reduce duplication of effort, and not to
keep a package out of the distribution. We seem to be entering an era of
more group control over this process, which is something I view with mixed
emotions. (being an anarchist at heart)
2. Rejecting packages because of their "political" content is not a good
idea in a "free and open" environment such as Debian. The broad range of
political opinion expressed by this group makes it pretty clear that
attempts to come to terms with these divergent oppinions almost always
leads to less than productive discussions that yield no conclusive
results.
WRT number 2, I installed the Hurd a couple of years ago, when it was
still pretty flakey, and was surprised to find that among the 75 meg of
compressed programs could be found the "Declaration of Independance" and
the "Constitution of the United States of America". Finding these
documents in a flegling OS of high negative bloat would have been
surprising from anyone but the FSF. Why should finding the kitchen sink in
Debian be any more surprising? We have always made it our goal to have
"everything"!
I can name several software packages that I don't think "need" to go into
Debian. I defer to the wishes of the package maintainer and the users of
that package for a determination of their usefulness.
Closing off the opportunity to install "useless" packages goes counter to
I core ideals of freedom and open access.
I have no problems with the ideas to create separate sections for these
purely textual packages, but I suggest that, unless we take a systematic
approach to such a reorganization, and include all of the other pockets of
bloat within the distribution, we will continue to revisit this problem
just like we are doing with the "list volume on devel" problem.
We just need to take a broader view and look at how to separate the
distribution into logically identifiable chunks that are semi-indepenent
of the rest of the distribution. Pure documents are one obvious
separation, but certainly not the only ones.
Waiting is,
On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Ben Collins wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 at 06:37:23AM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Jens Lisner wrote:
> > > distribution. At least some texts have to be commented. Or do you want
> > > "Mein Kampf" in your distribution?
> >
> > Yes, I would like Mein Kampf in our distribution. While not agreeing with
> > it, I feel its important for people to be able to see for themselves this
> > document that had a huge historical impact. Do you know its censored here in
> > Canada? We Canadians can't even read it and decide for ourselves. I say no
> > to censorship.
> >
> > If you don't know what led up to the mistakes of the past, how can you learn
> > from them?
>
> This isn't about censorship, this is about Debian being a software
> distribution. As for the bible arguments, it is distributed as an add-on
> (iirc) for fortune which makes it work with a system related program. The
> anarchist package is nothing more than an html mirror.
>
> If we don't draw a line, we will have OCR fanatics scanning in all kinds
> of material and packaging the entire library.
>
> --
> ----- -- - -------- --------- ---- ------- ----- - - --- --------
> Ben Collins <b.m.collins@larc.nasa.gov> Debian GNU/Linux
> OpenLDAP Core - bcollins@openldap.org bcollins@debian.org
> UnixGroup Admin - Jordan Systems The Choice of the GNU Generation
> ------ -- ----- - - ------- ------- -- ---- - -------- - --- ---- - --
>
>
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>
Dwarf
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