Subject: Re: fortune-mod propagates various non-nice things

From: Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:57:04 +0200

Am Mittwoch, dem 20.07.2022 um 10:45 +0200 schrieb Maxime Devos:
> [...]
> Moving to a friendly fork would be an option, but we need a fork for
> that, and I'm not finding a clear choice -- I only found those on 
> <https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/>, but most of the time
> they are often rather specific (e.g.: 'The #kernelnewbies fortune
> file', not an unified collection with lots of quotes on lots of
> things, so no clear fork springs out.
I think there's two problems to tackle here.  First, fortune-mod does
not support an environment like FORTUNE_PATH and it'd be difficult to
patch it to do so (trust me, I've looked at the code and it's
horrible).  Second, we need quotes replacements – once FORTUNE_PATH is
implemented, we could even have separate packages, provided that all of
them pass our QA.

In order to solve the first problem, I'll clear my mind and come up
with an alternative set of fortune tools (ideally once to which we can
apply the GPL3 rather than the BSD4).

> There's maybe <https://github.com/JKirchartz/fortunes>, which at
> first sight doesn't seem bad and seems to have lots of things, so if
> someone wants to preserve fortune, they can write a patch to switch
> to that fortunes database?
Would you be willing to do a complete evaluation of this database?  If
you find that it is indeed better than the one packaged by shlomifish,
replacing them would be easy.  First, add a snippet to the origin of
fortune-mod to delete the datfiles, second add a phase to install
JKirchartz'.

Cheers