Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Debian Package Request for GPC-Slots 2 Rejected - Unfairly?

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

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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?

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Debian Package Request for GPC-Slots 2 Rejected - Unfairly? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 136 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:31PM (#119247)

    I don't think it should be up to the distro maintainers to make judgments like that. If the software isn't harmful from a technological standpoint (that is, it doesn't damage the computer system in some way), and it merely expresses ideas that some may find offensive, then a package for it should obviously be included. And the package's description would obviously describe what the software does, so users can make an informed decision about whether or not they want to install it. But at least users would have the option. That's the point of a distro: making it convenient for users to install software. It should not be about filtering software based on ideas the software may express.