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title: "Cleaning up fortune and friends"
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date: 2022-11-20T22:22:22+11:00
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draft: true
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showSummary: true
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summary: "As it turns out, fortune-mod has an -o option for \"offensive\" fortunes, which range from vaguely off-colour
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to wildly homophobic and outright racist. We figured someone should clean up and reorganise the program to get rid
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of anything vile, and replace the offensive category with an NSFW category."
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---
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# Background
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> **(Selene)** Hi there. Unlike most of the blogs on here, I'll be narrating this one. This topic is closer to my heart,
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> and requires less technical expertise than most of the others. I'll still defer to Ashe for any code changes, though.
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> The gods know I can't grok C to save my life.
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The [original fortune package](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix)) was written in 1979, a good 43 years ago.
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Obviously, times have changed since than, and the package itself has gone through several revisions and re-writes.
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Fortunes have also been added, removed, and moved around.
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There currently exist two maintained distributions. The [original BSD version](https://github.com/ahills/fortune),
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repackaged to run on Alpine Linux, and [fortune-mod](https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-mod), which is a re-write in C.
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## Why is this a problem?
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Three Reasons:
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1. A lot of the "offensive" fortunes are simply insensitive, mocking, or degrading by today's standards.
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Even were they not, it sets a bad example to have a fortunes package that spits out slurs or homophobia[^1]
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at people by default, even if it *is* gated behind a flag. If people truly want these fortunes, they should
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be contained in their own package that distros can opt and out of as they please,
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instead of everything being clubbed together.
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2. Sensibilities have changed since the 1970s, and while some fortunes have been removed, a lot of the fortunes in these
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packages would get you a stern talking-to if your manager saw it. These should live in an NSFW category.
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While this overlaps with an "offensive" category, it is not the same thing.
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3. As fortunes have been written, added, modified, and removed, the categories have gotten blurry and indistinct. The
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fortunes themselves need a re-organisation and trim.
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[^1]: Or Hitler quotes, for that matter.
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## How do we fix this?
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There's a number of problems here, but fundamentally, they are all organisational problems. As such, our first task is to tag each fortune as NSFW, a candidate for removal, or inaccurate in its category.
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From there we can restructure the packages and propose these changes upstream.
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## Where do we start?
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We'll start with BSD's `fortune` package, as used in Alpine, for two reasons. For one, it is smaller than `fortunes-mod`. For two, the Alpine Linux maintainers tend to be relatively sensible, so this will be a good proving ground.
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## Let's get to it
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We started by mirroring the [fortune](https://github.com/ahills/fortune) package used on Alpine.
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### First steps
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The very first thing we'll do is move the default branch from `master` to `main`. This is a very small thing, but if we should be thorough if we're going to do this.
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### Scanning through the fortunes
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In the BSD/Alpine version, the fortunes are located in the `datfiles` directory, and the files we care about are:
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- fortunes-o
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- fortunes2-o
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- limerick
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These are noted as having the "offensive" fortunes, however we'll also give the non-offensive fortunes a scan. Since the fortunes in this version aren't categorised, we'll leave them uncategorised for now. Maybe a project for later.
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> **(Doll)** Doll will remind Miss Selene about this another time!
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>
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> **(Selene)** Thanks Doll.
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We've created a [full breakdown]({{< ref "lists/fortunes-cleanup" >}}) of each fortune that was removed, moved, or altered, and *why*, if you're interested. Content Notices for that page are **everything**. This is not a joke. I try to provide a summary near the top of the kinds
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of content present, but it is not exhaustive, and fortunes are not individually marked and spoilered.
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By the by, huge thanks to the Treehouse Systems community for helping us out with screening these.
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