The future of fortune(6)

[Mike Karels]

I apologize for a belated response to this thread, as well as for prolonging
it.  However, I didn't want to respond until I had a chance to review the
thread and the background.  Having done that, I am unhappy with how we got
to where we are, and I think discussion has not touched some important
issues.

First, for those who have not seen the original commit message in question,
here it is:

> Remove all fortune datfiles except freebsd-tips.

> Humour is a funny thing. What is funny to one person is not funny to all
> people. What is insightful to one person is similarly not universal. The
> fortune datfiles have been around a long time and have undoubtedly amused
> people but it's time to acknowledge their subjective, and in some cases
> at least potentially offensive, nature and stop distributing them with the
> imprimatur of the FreeBSD project.

> If anyone wishes to distribute these via other mechanisms they are welcome to
> check them out of history and do so.

> MFC after:      2 days

This sounds very much like a pronouncement on behalf of the project, but as
far as I know there was no discussion at all that would make this a formal
decision.  Furthermore, the change made the system internally inconsistent,
i.e. it broke things.

We were then presented with this in the first email on this thread:

> I would like people?s opinion on which of the following two paths we should take:

> 1) Complete removal of fortune and freebsd-tips, remove its usage from the default .login/.profile files.

> 2) Reworking fortune(6) to remove the offensive fortune flag and make freebsd-tips the default, possibly by symlinking it as /usr/share/games/fortune/fortunes.

I see no reason that these should be the only two possible options.  I see
at least two other reasonable options:

3) Put it back the way that it was.

4) Move the "offensive" datfiles to a port, but leave fortune and at least
freebsd-tips in the system.  I note that some of the non -o limericks
are reasonably considered offensive, but I am not aware of problems in, or
complaints about, the main fortunes datfile.

There has been no valid justification, either in the original commit, the
initial email on this thread, or later in the thread, for removal.  There
has been general "let's move everything to packages" sentiment.  Personally,
I do not understand the goal of moving more of base (or all of it?) into
packages.  One criterion mentioned was whether it was required to build
the sytem.  That is a poor criterion, as embedded systems are mostly
cross-compiled, and so nothing would be in base by that criterion.
csh and vi are not required to build the system, but seem like things
that should remain in base in any case.  If someone wants to explain the
motivation for moving much of the system into packages, please do so (but
in a different thread; or point me to a thread that I have missed).

fortune has been a part of BSD since long before FreeBSD.  It is not a
game, and is not installed in /usr/games.  It seems to me to be a part
of the BSD heritage, and removing it requires consensus rather than someone's
whim.

Chris H wrote:
> HooWee! Here we go again... :) 

No kidding.  At least 30 years ago, when I was at CSRG, a female professor
complained that she had received an offensive fortune when she logged out.
After some investigation, we found that she was using her husband's account,
and he had "fortune -o" in his .logout file.  Case closed.

		Mike