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