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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: 2, Informative) by rleigh on Monday November 24 2014, @12:24AM
I'm one of the people who has been moving slowly over to FreeBSD. I'm mostly entirely migrated at this point.
Why FreeBSD? It's the most usable of the BSDs and it seemed like the best choice when I was evaluating things around this time last year. It's fine on the servers, and it's also fine on the desktop (I'm typing this on a PC-BSD 10.1 install while working on some code).
Why not Linux? I'm planning for how things might play out over the next few years, not just what's OK just now. The systemd people are doing their level best to thoroughly entrench themselves in the base of all Linux systems. At best, people are going to be forced to implement systemd-compatible APIs in order to carry on functioning well, and that by design will tie you to systemd, forcing you to play catchup with their continual churn. We last saw this type of behaviour from Microsoft. But we have a "stability promise" they say (with their fingers crossed since they've broken their promise already more than once). Which Linux distributions would be a viable replacement? At the moment I can only think of one: Gentoo. I have a lot of respect for the openrc and eudev developers, and I hope they can stand up against the pressure to cave in. But the systemd people can and are pressuring them. And there are limits to how much you can do when you're a small group of volunteers who have to keep on top of all the changes in the system around them. That was one of the arguments for pushing systemd into Debian, albeit not one I agree with. If I was installing a new Linux system today I'd probably go with Gentoo or Debian stable while it lasts.
Regards,
Roger
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday November 24 2014, @01:15PM
You make sense but the trend I am witnessing is distros waking up to the hypothesis that systemd+dbus is a moving target meant to keep moving and not be trivial to replace, so that who controls systemd development can get ahead of everybody else in implementing stuff, much akin to google and android.
So void linux jumped ship for runit, manjaro is jumping ship for openrc. And all of this is before systemd is completely entrenched (until debian stable dies, but oldstable is still alive, so...)
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