Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Debian Language Police Department (PD)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 05, 2025

Metacity PD

Last year: [Video] Debian's Newfound Love of Censorship Has Become a Threat to the Entire Internet

Censoring software is one thing. Daniel Pocock wrote many articles about Debian censoring particular software, just like Google, Apple and Microsoft do. Now we can see how Debian also censors words in particular applications.

Looking how imperative bug title sounds I thought I missed a GR on this or at least a detailed discussion with a clear conclusion before this bug is filed with this severity. The only thing I found was this thread in debian-project

https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2023/08/threads.html#00044

This thread started after fortunes-off removal and I think it had no clear conclusion, leaving to maintainers to decide on individual -off packages. You are one of the contributors, so I will not go into the details.

I am not current fortunes-es maintainer, but did some work in initial steps of the package and have been tracking it since then. I prepared initial version of the off section trying to strip everything that I considered not apropriate even for this section (explicit calls for violence should not be here, as well as things of too low quality). I added some fortunes with fun on males or females that I considered could even get a smile from supposed target. They are in the off package only because some people have a very low offense threshold and this helps to deal with this.

So, I fully agree with fortunes-it-off maintainer when closing #1109167 and #1109165. Package is not automatically installed and AFAIR there has never been complaints about anyone that was offended by this -off package, so should be fine.

The process is subjective. It's also not subjected to any democratic oversight, not even a GR.

So "as far as I recall," according to him, "there has never been complaints about anyone that was offended by this -off package".

But they remove it anyway.

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