[Debian-astro-maintainers] Bug#941466: Sextractor - Rename package?

[Ole Streicher]

Hi Sergio,

On 01.10.19 13:00, Sergio Gelato wrote:
> * Ole Streicher [2019-10-01 09:18:01 +0200]:
>> I personally completely agree that the name is offending and should be
>> changed. This should however happen in a coordinated way -- including
>> conda-forge and Fedora (and ideally upstream as well). I made a comment
>> on the conda-forge PR #8764.
> 
> I don't find the name offensive. Some spam filters might (the "Scunthorpe
> problem"). Shall we also ban sexagesimal arithmetic?
> 
> (OK, you wrote "offending". In this context that presumably means it goes
> against Debian policy. Which section of the Policy Manual?)

If it was against Debian Policy, I would just have renamed it (or at
least make the bug RC). It does however not go against Debian Policy;
that's why I wrote "personally offending".

I feel like it is an pubertal joke from the 90s, especially since it is
accompanied with the abbreviation "sex" for the program itself (not in
Debian, though), and "default.sex" for the configuration file. That is
just not a professional name. And I also already received a (friendly)
complaint about this name and its use in Debian (specifically on the
Debian Astro flyer).

And now, it seems that there are some other people which felt repelled
by the name as well (see the twitter thread in the bug report). You may
see this differently, but IMO our goal is to do astronomy (or, to
write/maintain software for astronomy), and we will strengthen this goal
if we make it welcoming to everyone and remove childish jokes when they
appear to offend.

>> Note that we already renamed the executable name from "sex" to
>> "sextractor", which is something upstream would also agree. The issue is
>> to rename sextractor to source-extractor (or similar).
> 
> If Debian policy requires it, go ahead. Otherwise I'd wait and see what
> upstream ends up doing. So far upstream seems disinclined to rename the
> package.

I hope that we will have a discussion on ADASS 2019 in Groningen next
week with the author (he will present the proposed successor of the
package there). I will in any case wait until then with the decision.

There is also a discussion with other distributions (so far,
conda-forge) about to coordinate the renaming.

Best regards

Ole