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