Debian Bug report logs - #223988
~/.fortunes

Reply or subscribe to this bug.

Display info messages

Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>

Subject: ~/.fortunes

Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 20:18:23 +0100

Package: fortune-mod
Version: 9708-35
Severity: wishlist

Many people maintain their own fortune database. It would be nice if
fortune-mod would make that easier, by supporting a .fortunes (or
similar) in whatever $HOME points to.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux worldmusic 2.4.21 #1 SMP vr dec 5 10:56:48 CET 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=nl_BE, LC_CTYPE=nl_BE

Versions of packages fortune-mod depends on:
ii  fortunes [fortune-cookie-db 9708-35      Data files containing fortune cook
ii  fortunes-bofh-excuses [fort 1.1-8        BOFH excuses for fortune
ii  fortunes-debian-hints [fort 1.5          Debian Hints for fortune
ii  fortunes-min [fortune-cooki 9708-35      Data files containing fortune cook
ii  fortunes-off [fortune-cooki 9708-35      Data files containing offensive fo
ii  libc6                       2.3.2.ds1-10 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  librecode0                  3.6-10       Shared library on which recode is 

-- no debconf information

Message #10 received at 223988@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Andrea Colangelo <warp10@ubuntu.com>

To: 223988@bugs.debian.org, Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>

Subject: Re: ~/.fortunes

Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2013 16:46:32 +0200

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

tags 223988 wontfix

Thank you for reporting this bug.

I agree with you that adding custom fortunes in a simple way would be a nice
addition to fortune-mod. OTOH, this should be done by upstream developers, who
seems vanished, unfortunately. Further, the whole way fortne-mod accesses the
db and extracts fortunes should be deeply straightened up.

After adopting this package, I wish to work on this as a fortune-mod upstream
too. While I'm tagging this bug as wontfix now, I'll add your feature request
to the ToDo list.


-- 
Andrea Colangelo                     |   http://andreacolangelo.com
Ubuntu Developer  <www.ubuntu.com>   |   Debian Maintainer  <www.debian.org>

[signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, inline)]

Message #17 received at 223988@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Antoine Beaupre <anarcat@debian.org>

To: Andrea Colangelo <warp10@ubuntu.com>, 223988@bugs.debian.org

Cc: Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>

Subject: Re: Bug#223988: ~/.fortunes

Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2018 14:55:44 -0400

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

On Sat, Jul 06, 2013 at 04:46:32PM +0200, Andrea Colangelo wrote:
> I agree with you that adding custom fortunes in a simple way would be a nice
> addition to fortune-mod. OTOH, this should be done by upstream developers, who
> seems vanished, unfortunately.

Well, "upstream" is ... complicated here. fortune was written by Ken
Arnold in something like 1986, about thirty years ago, and didn't change
that much since then. It was part of the ancestral v7 Unix and from
there landed in the various BSDs. The one we have in Debian is
apparently from NetBSD, but I checked and the NetBSD one is actually
pretty similar to the FreeBSD one as well, just like DragonflyBSD.
OpenBSD actually went and audited the heck out of it. Here are the
canonical sources for all of those:

http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/games/fortune/fortune/fortune.c
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/fortune/fortune.c
https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/games/fortune/fortune/fortune.c
https://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/history/HEAD:/games/fortune/fortune/fortune.c

That said, it might be worth filing a feature request in the FreeBSD
bugtracker, as an upstream. They recently removed all fortune databases
from their source tree so this might actually be quite useful for them.

> Further, the whole way fortne-mod accesses the
> db and extracts fortunes should be deeply straightened up.

Well, that's a hornet's nest, if you ask me. You might break a lot of
things if you don't just add the thing and try to shuffle things around
instead.

Note that there are other fortune implementations out there which might
make implementing this feature much easier. Just one example, linked
(strangely) from wikipedia:

https://software.clapper.org/fortune/
https://github.com/bmc/fortune

There are about half a dozen of those on pypi, for what that's worth...
None of them support ~/.fortunes as far as I know. But many fortunes
program (including FreeBSD's, but not Net or OpenBSD's) allow
environment variables (e.g. FORTUNE_PATH) to modify the search path.

So if that would be acceptable for you, syncing with the FreeBSD
upstream would allow a variation of this to work with environment
variables.

A.

-- 
Dr. King’s major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you
suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to
change his heart. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for
nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United
States has none.        - Stokely Carmichael

[signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, inline)]

Send a report that this bug log contains spam.