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posted by janrinok on Sunday November 23 2014, @09:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-love-for-trolls dept.

The Debian project has suffered from a long string of negative events recently, ranging from severe discontent over the inclusion of systemd, to talk of forking the project, to a grave bug affecting the important 'wine' package, to the resignation and reduced involvement of long time contributors.

The latest strife affecting Debian revolves around a request for a Debian package of the GPC-Slots 2 software. This request has been rejected with little more than an ad hominem attack against the software's author.

In response to the request, Stephen Gran wrote,

This is code by someone who routinely trolls Debian. I doubt we want any more poisonous upstreams in Debian, so I at least would prefer this never get packaged.

Jonathan Wiltshire proceeded to mark the request as 'wontfix', and closed it.

While Debian does strive to maintain high standards regarding the software it packages, the negative and personal nature of this rejection, without any apparent technical or licensing concerns, appears to conflict with Debian's own Code of Conduct. Such a personal attack could be seen as contradictory to the Code of Conduct's mandate that Debian participants "Be respectful", "Be collaborative", and most importantly, "Assume good faith".

Given its recent troubles as of late, many of them concerning the poor treatment of Debian developers and users alike, can Debian really afford to get embroiled in yet another negative incident?

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Monday November 24 2014, @02:19AM

    by Marand (1081) on Monday November 24 2014, @02:19AM (#119286) Journal

    This post, and some of the other recent ones on Debian were all posted by an AC with an axe to grind. I suspect it is the same AC that in numerous post complains about lots of things Debian.

    SN is not a debian community site and he/she should go elsewhere.

    I had the same thought when I read the summary. It has similarities in writing style, tone, and heavy negative slant when compared to some of the other submissions and many of the AC comments. I'm referring to the ones that provide the same laundry list of grievances and links, which lack neutrality and just look like axe-grinding by someone with an agenda. It's clickbait or propaganda style writing, and one of the things that pissed me off at Slashdot.

    Submissions like this one, or that wine-bug one, look like the work of someone whose goal is to discredit Debian in any way possible. The wine one was especially bad. Bug found in a testing repository, bug reported, bug fixed; better alert the presses about how it's one more in a long line of failures by Debian staff!

    Judging by the slant of the submission, and the obscurity of what it's about, this is probably the same guy that had his code rejected and has been trolling Debian people. It's being presented as just some poor coder being rejected for being disliked, but the code itself has stuff like ASCII spam of "Just Say No To Women's Rights" as a response to certain user input, and the packaging request is being sent from a mailinator address (@sogetthis.com), which is an anonymous throw-away email provider. The program, packaging request, and SN submission are all likely the same person. This whole thing is rubbish and someone fell for it.

    Bonus points: he even embedded deCSS into the code as an "easter egg". This guy's a crackpot on a level comparable to APK.

    ---

    Also, if anybody else is brave enough to check the source, prepare for pain. It's a 24,639 line Perl script, in a single file , with some absolutely horrible coding style. If anyone else finds anything hilarious, let me know. Here are a few good things I found skimming through:

    * 24,639 lines in a single file, instead of using modules to split out each separate game and common bits to all
    * Lots of copy-pasting of the same code for separate parts. What's code-reuse, guys?
    * Eleven different if statements just to format money display based on how many digits are in the currency total, instead of a sprintf() and a couple variable changes. This happens for every numeric display.
    * Everything seems to be global variables. No attempts at limiting variable scope ('local' or 'my' keywords) outside of code attributed to someone else.
    * He has a similar aversion to using arrays, namespaces, and hashes.
    * Does weird weird crap like print "\n\n\n\n\n\n\n" (with a lot more \n than that) instead of using Perl operators (e.g. print "\n" x 7 to do same thing). Wouldn't stand out if it were an isolated problem, but lots of similar issues throughout.
    * Prints an ASCII-art '7' by using 14 separate anonymous subroutines, each printing a single line of text.
    * Has at least three separate sets of subs like above for dollar signs, and some others for other things.
    * The slot machine code has separate subroutines for each location on the machine with the same boilerplate if/elsif statements in each, but calling a different set of 14 subs to print different ASCII pictures. So, 182 different subroutines just to display the output of the slots.
    * Despite his love of subroutines, things like the "title screen" are hard-coded into multiple places instead of put into their own sub.

    I don't even want to keep looking any more. This should be kept out of Debian just on principle of being some of the worst code I've ever had to see. He didn't even have the decency to write the kind of proper, incomprehensible Perl that you can grudgingly applaud; this shit is nearly 25,000 lines of baby's first spaghetti code and would be at home in an old version of BASIC.

    It almost looks like he tried to make it as long and unclear as possible in the hopes that nobody would dare look at the code and catch the 'easter eggs', but they're done in a way that stands out, so he's probably just that bad and I'm just trying to rationalise away the terrible.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Informative=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @03:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @03:45AM (#119307)

    So WHY not write any of those perfectly fine arguments you came up with in 10 seconds, instead of writing troll?

    the packaging request is being sent from a mailinator address (@sogetthis.com), which is an anonymous throw-away email provider.

    A simple "We don't consider package request from anonymous email addresses" would've been fine for this particular request.
    If the submitter is a troll, he'll have to try harder next time.

    the code itself has stuff like ASCII spam of "Just Say No To Women's Rights" as a response to certain user input

    This could be another simple response, ala "Why is this in a slot machine app?".

    And then there are all the actual code issues you pointed out. All valid arguments. All ignored in favor of "troll".

    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Monday November 24 2014, @04:38AM

      by Marand (1081) on Monday November 24 2014, @04:38AM (#119319) Journal

      So WHY not write any of those perfectly fine arguments you came up with in 10 seconds, instead of writing troll?

      If you want an answer to that, you'd do better by asking the people that were involved. There were two (the one that made the comment, and the one that closed the bug as WONTFIX), and I doubt either one reads SN.

      I almost ignored the whole thing because it's clearly part of the same anti-Debian crusade as some of the other submissions (including attempts to submit the same things to Slashdot), but the code itself was hilarious, so I changed my mind and decided it'd be funny to wade into the muck.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @06:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @06:59AM (#119334)

    Debian doesn't need any help discrediting itself. The RedHat cloners have gotten their way.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @07:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @07:09AM (#119338)

    You looked at the code and looked at the person and dislike the game.
    And some people skipped all that and just played the game and liked it:
    https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/gpcslots2-in-a-different-direction-altogther/ [wordpress.com]

    Wonder what' they're doing wrong?
    (They even liked that it was in one convienent file.)

    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Monday November 24 2014, @08:40AM

      by Marand (1081) on Monday November 24 2014, @08:40AM (#119352) Journal

      You looked at the code and looked at the person and dislike the game.
      And some people skipped all that and just played the game and liked it:
      https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/gpcslots2-in-a-different-direction-altogther/ [wordpress.com]

      Wonder what' they're doing wrong?
      (They even liked that it was in one convienent file.)

      Nothing I said indicates whether I like or dislike the game, and it's curious that you'd take my comments on the code quality as such. That reaction, and the defensive nature of your reply, is the sort of response a content creator makes when attempting to deflect criticism of their creation.

      It's also interesting that you had that link ready to use to defuse criticism. It seems to be relatively unknown, recent, and only has a couple non-author comments, both by Mikee (as proven by the commenter uploading gpcslots1), who mentioned Debian's refusal to distribute along with an interesting ESR blog post about censorship. (A blog post that I'd never seen but which helps confirm my original "crackpot" analysis of Mikee)

      Combining that info, the reaction to my previous post, the anti-Debian and hateful comments, the axe-grinding submissions, and the rapid turnaround (anonymous inclusion request, rejection a day later, submission to Slashdot's firehose and SN within two days of that), it's starting to look like SN has attracted a wild MikeeUSA.

      Well, Mikee, welcome to SN; if you're planning on staying, you should just make an account and be honest about it. I don't care if you're here, but I do hope the admins do a better job of vetting your submissions in the future.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @01:02PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @01:02PM (#119396)

        Oh, Marand. You're always babbling on about "conspiracies". LOL!

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday November 24 2014, @01:59PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday November 24 2014, @01:59PM (#119405) Homepage
    Oh, my, that truly is the code of a barely-compentent 10-year-old!

    Sigh..., he can't even attribute things correctly:

    print colored(' This number was found to be a probable prime by Charles M. Hannum and proven ',"$boldblack on_$bgcblack"); print"\n";
    print colored(' prime by Phil Carmody ',"$boldblack on_$bgcblack"); print"\n";

    And of course it goes without saying that I don't want to be associated with a jerk like that :-(
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves