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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: 2, Insightful) by Bot on Sunday November 23 2014, @10:24PM

    by Bot (3902) on Sunday November 23 2014, @10:24PM (#119220) Journal

    The code of conduct doesn't ask debian devs to be as forgiving as Saint Francis high on coke, which is the threshold of forgiveness in this particular case.
    Not because the guy is an antifeminist. Because it is clearly trolling. If I were a debian volunteer I would not touch the code with a 10 foot pole, I'd have lots of better things to do.

    Well done, debian. FOR A CHANGE :D

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @10:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @10:30PM (#119223)

    I don't think Debian should be playing childish games like this, replete with name-calling. They're a Linux distro, for crying out loud. If there's software available, and it might be useful to even just one Debian user, I think they should do the right thing and offer a package for it.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Sunday November 23 2014, @10:33PM

      by Bot (3902) on Sunday November 23 2014, @10:33PM (#119224) Journal

      Full Definition of NAME-CALLING: the use of offensive names especially to win an argument or to induce rejection or condemnation (as of a person or project) without objective consideration of the facts.

      Have you objectively considered the facts? care to share your analysis?

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      Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @10:42PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @10:42PM (#119226)

        I see one Debian maintainer labeling somebody else a "troll" (which is meant in an insulting and derogatory manner, obviously; that is, it's "name calling"), without giving any evidence to back this up.

        I also don't see any discussion of technical issues with this software.

        I think it's reasonable to expect a higher standard than that from Debian and the people involved with the project.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:16PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:16PM (#119238)

          From the 3 minutes of research required, I can confirm the software/shitware author is a troll and a jackass.
          Debian has better things to do, if you want his crappy perl scripts go get them yourself.

          • (Score: 2) by fnj on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:37PM

            by fnj (1654) on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:37PM (#119250)

            You didn't confirm SHIT. You made a value judgement, just as Debian did. In both cases, I don't specifically disapprove of the value judgement. Just be honest about what it is.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @07:06AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @07:06AM (#119336)

              I found his source code and looked through it you teat.
              Vi search commands are handy, especially if you know what to look for.

              Too bad, so sad, troll!

        • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday November 24 2014, @12:28PM

          by Bot (3902) on Monday November 24 2014, @12:28PM (#119386) Journal

          The logical consequence of your line of reasoning (calling troll a troll is obvious name calling) is that name calling occurs every time. It's an interesting conclusion because its corollary is that you should STFU about everything, to avoid name calling. Will you be consistent?

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          • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @12:55PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @12:55PM (#119393)

            Why are you trying to derail good discussion with name calling?

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:29PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:29PM (#119246) Journal

      I don't think Debian should be playing childish games like this, replete with name-calling. They're a Linux distro, for crying out loud. If there's software available, and it might be useful to even just one Debian user, I think they should do the right thing and offer a package for it.

      Any Debian package needs maintenance time. The time this package would take for maintenance would be taken away from the maintenance time for other packages. So there should certainly be a usefulness filter for inclusion into the official Debian distribution. After all, it's not as if you couldn't install a program just because it's not in the official distribution. You can add third-party repositories, or you can download a .deb from the internet and install it directly. It's not like Apple's App Store where if Apple doesn't let you in, you can't get your code onto the device.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:35PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:35PM (#119248)

        Maintaining the packages relating to systemd takes maintainer time and effort. Many, many Debian users have said they do not want systemd present on their Debian systems. Using your rationale, each and every package relating to systemd should be removed from Debian, because they take maintainer time away from working on the packages that Debian users do want, and that's clearly unacceptable.

    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday November 24 2014, @12:35PM

      by Bot (3902) on Monday November 24 2014, @12:35PM (#119389) Journal

      I think that your philosophy would make debian vulnerable to denial of service (plain DoS, not even DDoS) by the first 12 years old troll.

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    • (Score: 1) by forkazoo on Tuesday November 25 2014, @12:08AM

      by forkazoo (2561) on Tuesday November 25 2014, @12:08AM (#119599)

      It won't be useful to anybody. It's practically a CS101 intro course homework project, whose only distinctive feature is that it prints offensive things about women.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25 2014, @03:10AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25 2014, @03:10AM (#119661)

        It's a game. By definition it is not useful.
        Debian packages tons of games, many of them text based like this.
        This one even has a stockmarket to gamble in.

  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Arik on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:14PM

    by Arik (4543) on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:14PM (#119237) Journal
    "Not because the guy is an antifeminist."

    Now that seems like an interesting caveat. Are we to take it that this person has been categorized as a 'troll' because he has dissented from SJMW dogma in regard to gender?
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:23PM (#119242)

      It would appear so!

    • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday November 24 2014, @01:18AM

      by hemocyanin (186) on Monday November 24 2014, @01:18AM (#119273) Journal

      What does the "M" stand for. And yes, I did RTFG but nothing made sense in this context.

      • (Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 24 2014, @01:40AM

        by Arik (4543) on Monday November 24 2014, @01:40AM (#119276) Journal
        It stands for "Social Justice Media Warrior [unz.com]"
        --
        If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
        • (Score: 2) by pogostix on Monday November 24 2014, @02:00AM

          by pogostix (1696) on Monday November 24 2014, @02:00AM (#119281)

          This comment is so pleasing to my eyes. Must be the font.

    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @03:11AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @03:11AM (#119297)

      How the heck is the parent comment off-topic? Debian's beef with the programmer of this software in question apparently revolves around feminism.

      Can somebody please do the right thing and fix the modding of the parent comment? It's absolutely on-topic!

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:51PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:51PM (#119258)

    If I were a debian volunteer

    An aspect not discussed is in a universe of github and pull reqs and distributed dev, the volunteer process in Debian is a weird cross between the early 90s and dark ages nobility. I'm saying its a little complicated. And RFPs are mostly going to get pulled from some poor unfortunate noob looking for fun. Can you imagine some poor bastard trying to maintain his first package stumbling into this, unknowningly just trying to help out, and impacting the ... social baggage it pulls in? It would be like a fly hitting a windshield at 50 mph. That poor bastard. Honestly, I'd just be sad for a noob like that.

    That alone is reason to scrap it.