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Details

This repository contains the original/classic FreeBSD fortune(6) datfiles, including offensives (fortune -o), which were present in FreeBSD until roughly November 13, 2017.

These files are direct copies from the FreeBSD repository, immediately prior to their removal in r325781 / git 0271df5.

Files

fortunes
fortunes-o
fortunes-o.sp.ok
fortunes.sp.ok
gerrold.limerick
limerick
limerick.sp.ok
murphy
murphy-o
murphy.sp.ok
startrek
startrek.sp.ok
zippy
zippy.sp.ok

Common Use

The FreeBSD pkg fortune-mod-freebsd-classic (port: misc/fortune-mod-freebsd-classic) can be used to install these classic datfiles for use. No other changes need be done, as fortune(6) searches for files in both /usr/share/games/fortune as well as /usr/local/share/games/fortune (the pkg/port installs the files in the latter).

Building

Use of strfile(8) is required to create a .dat file for each respective fortune. Use of the -C flag is a requirement. Then, the combination of both the non-dat and .dat file must be placed in the fortune(6) directory search path.

Use of the environment variable FORTUNE_PATH can also be used, but I found it to be quirky; things like FORTUNE_PATH=/path/to/dir fortune murphy would regularly output nothing for no reason I could determine.

I don't know the purpose of the .sp.ok files, though they look potentially related to classic spell/ispell.

History

Some fortunes were moved from standard to offensive on February 13th 2011 at ~18:18 UTC by Bruce Cran (brucec). This migration was done in r218650 / git d886030.

Removal of "political propaganda" (specifically, Rush Limbaugh quotes) from fortunes-o.real was done on February 5 2013 at ~14:39 UTC by Dag-Erling Smorgrav (des). Removal was done in r246362 / git 72c8e2d.

fortunes-o and its related bits were removed entirely from FreeBSD on March 12 2013 at ~12:35 UTC by John H. Baldwin (jhb). The commit message implies there was a discussion about this amongst the FreeBSD Core Team. Removal was done in r248200 / git 369cfc7.

On November 13 2017 at ~21:55 UTC, FreeBSD Port Management Team member Mark Felder (feld) removed all "fortune quotes attributed to or providing admiration of Adolf Hitler" from the fortunes file.

A day later, on November 14 2017 at ~21:30 UTC, FreeBSD Core Team member Benno Rice (benno) removed all the fortune datfiles, excluding freebsd-tips and freebsd-tips.dat. All removed files were subsequently added to ObsoleteFiles.inc (i.e. will be removed during make delete-old). Removal was done in r325828 / git a7833d5. This change also resulted in a brief discussion on the FreeBSD mailing list svn-src-all. Some references:

The only response was to the latter, where Rice stated, quote, "it was raised to core but I decided to take unilateral action", adding that the removal was based on his "discovery of quotes from Adolf Hitler in the file", "trying to be the editors humour is not something we're really cut out for and that we should get out of the game", and that "personally I feel that this is the kind of thing that doesn't need to live on". There was no mention or comment from Felder.

The removal of said quotes, and said fortunes, was more extensively discussed on the NetBSD current-users mailing list. Readers of the aforementioned mailing list post should read every single reply in the thread, as there is some factual and contextually relevant details pertaining to the intentions of said quotes.

Commit History

fortunes-o and fortunes-o.dat generation

Prior to their removal, the way offensives (fortunes-o and fortunes-o.dat) were created was, to me, quite amusing:

  1. fortunes-o was created by essentially piping fortunes-o.real through tr(1) to rot13 its content (fortunes-o.real in the svn/cvs repository itself was in readable plain-text),

  2. fortunes-o.dat was created from the aforementioned fortunes-o file while using the -x flag to strfile(8), which causes fortune to rot13 the quote, "decoding" it before being shown.

Best I can tell, the above two steps were done solely to keep "offensive words" from being stored in plain-text on a users' filesystem.

There was also a file called fortunes-o.fake, which contained nothing but content informing the user that "offensive" fortunes were essentially disabled. The FreeBSD fortune Makefile could then be modified in-place through sed(1) during the build phase, to change TYPE=real into TYPE=fake, thus making fortune -o output said message: