Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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?

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
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: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:44PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:44PM (#119254)

    At what point does somebody's views/opinions become "too controversial"?

    When upstream gets kicked off mailing lists and for better or worse a lot of Debian "business" is transacted on mailing lists so "relations" (in a non-carnal sense) with upstream are going to be a bit difficult. I'd like to work with you on bug reports but you've been banned from our email server for misbehavior, so ...

    Also there is a factual issue with the interaction... This is just three dudes unofficially talking in the BTS. A BTS ticket should be created when a package is begun to be packaged to eliminate the possibility of duplicated effort. Although with leaf packages the effort tends toward the minimal so its not much loss LOL. This is a request bug. Technically its somewhat anti-social to prevent some theoretical devs from socializing about packaging this software but its not I suppose an overly major sin.

    So then "some maintainer" might package it up and submit it, and then the FTPmasters will decide to accept or reject, accept means its on the mirror network with everything else, reject means ... you figure it out. For the reasons in the first paragraph this is unlikely to be the usual detailed and non-controversial legalistic stuff. With normal upstreams, basically ftpmasters make sure a package is legal to distribute (DFSG, documented licenses, etc) and does it meet a minimal quality standard (like does this Fing thing even compile, is it lintian clean, does it follow a version of Policy more recent than 2009, pretty legalistic stuff). There is some other categorization stuff like the overrides file for priority and category. Anyway FTPmasters "really" decide what is in or out of Debian not some dudes in the BTS.

    (If you think I'm posting as an official Debian function, or you think I'm on the publicity team, that would be pretty strong evidence of insanity. None the less my summary above is my best attempt reasonable accurate short summary of the truth. I actually checked the most recent ftpmaster team delegation I could find to make sure these dudes aren't in it, thats the area I'm most likely to F up. Saying that I have made the official Debian pronouncement on this topic would be making the exact same mistake as the original claim, which is kind of self-referentially funny)

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2