RFC: An app category for "adult" material?

[Kevin Krammer]

Hi,

On Tuesday, 2011-11-01, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The latest tickets in what's been a recurring item for our application
> search in Ubuntu is
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/883800. It
> basically boils down to the fact that you may not want PornView (or
> other adult apps) popping up as you type a search during a
> presentation (or have your kids look at it for that matter).
> 
> I think that no one wants to get into censorship  - and there are many
> ramifications of this problem. For example, it might not be
> appropriate if bible-related apps show up while a rabbi is giving a
> talk. Make up your own examples ad lib. This all get's really complex
> really fast.
> 
> So keeping it to a problem that we can easily solve a user proposed
> something that I also think the upstream app authors wouldn't mind:
> Introducing a new XDG category "Adult". That way it is a sensible
> upstream opt-in, and distros and app stores can handle it like they
> see fit.

I find this a rather problematic approach.

First, as Joseph has already stated, "adult" is a rather vague concept, 
extremely based on cultural factors.

Second, it does not address the allegded use case of something not showing up 
in search at all. Searching for "view" would still match the program's name, 
now probably even labelled as "Adult".
It would still be in the application launcher, likely even having a promiment 
spot of a labelled section.

It seems to me that what you want instead is a way to make things not show up 
in certain places, something conceptually a lot more like DoNotShowIn, e.g. 
not show in search, not show in history, not show in command completion.

As for the "OMG, think of the children" problem, concerned parents should 
rather control which software they have installed on the computer accessible 
by their offspring, or even do white listing based on actually checking whether 
something is appropriate.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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