Fortune Program -Moving->RE: Wanda is broken

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 4/23/05, Senthil_OR at dell.com <Senthil_OR at dell.com> wrote:
> This brings up a very important topic for discussion.
> Namely why is Fedora not shipping fortune. Agreed there might be some
> licensing issues.

I'm not sure this is important.. nor do i think it necessarily timely
to discuss. Fortune was removed before fc1 shipped. It wasn't even in
rhl9. Anything that took you over 4 release cycles to notice (2+years)
can't be that important.

The only reason people like yourself haven't noticed that the real
fortune program wasn't included in ANY fedora release to date was the
fact that a trivial workaround hack script was provided in the
xscreensaver package to give things like wanda and noseguy trivial
system information text to display by default instead of quotes
provided by fortune.

Now... the workaround script has been removed, either delibrately or
accidentally when the xscreensaver package was divided into several
sub-packages.  The only thing really worth discussing now is what to
do about that. Either the applications that used the workaround script
need to point to something else by default.. or the trivial workaround
script should come back.

The workaround script was very trivial and I'm not sure exactly what
to point wanda to by default in its place.  All the trivial script did
was test for fortune and if fortune was not available spit out system
information using uname, redhat-release and uptime.  If the script
doesn't comeback as part of xscreensaver, then perhaps it should be
included as part of fedora-release package.  It's such a trivial
script, and if you want to point wanda or noseguy to something by
default, it can't get much simplier than
#!/bin/sh
if [ ! -d /usr/games/fortune -a -x /usr/games/fortune ]; then
        /usr/games/fortune $*
elif [ -x /usr/bin/fortune ]; then
        /usr/bin/fortune $*
else
        cat /etc/redhat-release
        uname -sr
        uptime
fi

Unless you just wanted to point it to /etc/fedora-release  and forgo
the extra system information.

-jef"fortune-mod was dropped from the distro when wu-ftpd was
dropped.. lets discuss the importance of wu-ftpd instead"spaleta