Debian's Anti-Harassment Team Is Removing A Package Over Its Name (phoronix.com)

quantic_oscillation7 shares a report: The latest notes from the Debian anti-harassment team on Wednesday caught my attention when reading, "We were requested to advice on the appropriateness of a certain package in the Debian archive. Our decision resulted in the package pending removal from the archive." Curiosity got the best of me... What package was deemed too inappropriate for the Debian archive?

When digging further, the package raised to the Debian Anti-Harassment Team was "Weboob." Weboob is short for "Web Outside of Browsers" as it's an open-source collection of software to script and automate the parsing/scraping/gathering-via-API of web data so that it can be consumed by different modules/applications. Weboob.org describes itself as "Weboob is a collection of applications able to interact with websites, without requiring the user to open them in a browser. It also provides well-defined APIs to talk to websites lacking one."

Weboob is Python-based and offers Qt-based user interfaces for accessing these different modules for reading data from different web-sites outside of any conventional web browser. Those interested can learn more about the software at Weboob.org. But, yes, the name is juvenile and likely inappropriate in most professional/corporate environments.

Comments

Um No

[DarkOx]

Um no "Web-Oh-Oh-Bee" is perfectly fine. The name is only juvenile of you yourself are a child and decide to pronounce it a different way.

Re:Um No

[im_thatoneguy]

HandJoob and WetBoobs are just people's overactive imaginations choosing to see things that aren't there? Seriously?

This team has already jumped the shark

[Anonymous Coward]

If anti-harassment is the reason why it was being removed, why was there no mention of who was being harassed and who reported the harassment?

This. I'm normally in favor of going after assholes who abuse and intimidate others. The extreme right would probably label me an SJW for not approving of sexual harassment, or being perfectly OK with Les Moonves being thrown out on his ass without his $120M golden parachute.

But this is ridiculous, and this is why, to paraphrase Bill Maher, "nobody likes you." It's not enough to be enlightened enough to go after dicks, you've got to learn how to not be one yourself. This smacks of the kind of humorless overzealousness that leadds to things like "woody" being banned because these fools can't tell if you're referring to an animated child's toy from a Pixar movie, or an erection, and since it could, possibly, be the latter, better ban it!

Remember the boob tube? It didn't refer to women's breast, it referred to the "boobs" (idiots) who watched it. But I bet that will set the fools off foaming at the mouth, and I say that as one who by and large SUPPORTS anti-harrassment policies.

The anti-harassment team pulls double duty

[rsilvergun]

to watch for dubious package names, that's all. It's not nothing to do with harassment, and if there wasn't a growing anti-SJW community riding a massive overreaction to an overreaction for YouTube videos and Patreon donations (with a healthy dose of money from right wing think tanks) we wouldn't have even noticed.

Keep calm and Debian on. This kind of stuff happens. Middle managers get sticks up their but over this sort of thing. If you've got to blame somebody blame them.

Re:Boobs!

[cascadingstylesheet]

So Debian has now banned a package because its combination of letters triggers irrational things in peoples heads.

All words are just arbitrary combinations of letters that convey meanings.

That doesn't magically make them all appropriate for all environments.

I'm sure it wouldn't take long to find a string of letters that you would blanch at, if it were a package name in Debian.

Re: Boobs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what the number one dictionary definition of boob is. Hint: it has nothing to do with breasts. To be fair, maybe you don't use dictionaries because of the dic.