Protection of Minors, was: Re: CoC policy for package contents

Am 01.08.25 um 11:23 schrieb Wouter Verhelst:

 > Parental controls don't need a separate section. They need you to not
 > give root access to the child.

Certainly, but legislators don't care about technicalities. If they say 
gras needs to be red they expect you to make it so. (Best example: legal 
interception needs to access E2EE encrypted content but without breaking 
E2EE - that's impossible? But we say so, make it work!)

 > I could see us perhaps add a field to debian/control to say "in
 > jurisdiction X, this package is considered acceptable for people over 
 > Y years of age",

There's a legal requirement for game distributors to mark games like 
that ("parental advisory"), I'm not sure whether that obligation applies 
to non-commercial distributors like Debian. But having that meta data 
would definitely be good.

 > and then add some controls in apt to disallow it to
 > install packages marked as such.

Somebody sufficiently motivated could develop something if the meta data 
were there.

 > But that is a lot of work for something
 > that could be solved easily by saying "do not give root passwords to
 > your children".

The problem is that some legislators (f.e. Germany starting Dec 2025) 
explicitly demand differentiated rights according to the childs age 
("you may install a and b but not x,y,z - 5 years older you may also 
install x and y but still not z"). So a boolean "root or not root" does 
not cover it.