If I were to fork it and remove offensive names and comments, it seems I would be best to obliterate/ignore the revision history.
It's kind of an interesting new problem: when disagreeable people make useful FOSS, the revision control system becomes a liability even to those with good intentions.
You seem to be pointing at a specific revision and the file doesn't seem to exist anymore in the current version of the repository. I confess I didn't check more than this though.
Does that really make it any better? It's in the commit history and now it's there for all of us to see. Why on earth anybody would write something like that is beyond me, but doing it in public is mind-bogglingly fucked up and stupid.
It's also legal, at least in some countries
[dead]
Well, unfortunately, you'd be wrong: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=907199
I feel that this is going to turn into my daily HN post in defense of free speech. There's nothing that the name adds, it's stupid, it's silly, and it's juvenile. The authors themselves, in fact, seem to be racist shitbags[1]. But Debian essentially deplatforming it is absolutely not the right move here. I think protecting speech is a hill worth dying on, and even a despicable Neo-Nazi should have the same right to speech as me or you.
[1] https://github.com/laurentb/weboob/blob/0ac4885ad8c212746584...