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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?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday November 24 2014, @01:32AM

    by jimshatt (978) on Monday November 24 2014, @01:32AM (#119275) Journal
    Agreed, but let's not make too big a fuss about this. Might've been handled better, but they're people too.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @03:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @03:15AM (#119299)

    But like the summary says early on, it has been one incident after another with Debian lately. It was never this bad before. Things have really gone to hell with the entire project after the systemd debacle.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @03:49AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @03:49AM (#119310)

      No, even the systemd "debacle" itself. And gamergate. There is new hatred in tech culture that did not exist before. As an old-timer, the range used to be from professional to juvenile. There was not this hate. Open hatred and personal attacks were not acceptable in the past. When I was young, we not only rode both ways uphill in the snow, we actually called out our peers in our online forums if they used personal attacks over a technical disagreement. People with very different technical preferences managed to have discussions together, even have their software included in the same OS distributions, without having to try to burn each other down and get each other excluded from the industry.

      It is really disgusting. People want to end other people's freakin' careers over technical complaints that aren't even real, that they heard about on the internet and heard repeated by some Grand Poobah and so they know it is Gospel and successful software engineers you disagree with are the Devil.

      For example, Lennart Poettering is one of the more successful software engineers of our age. His software is used by large numbers of people. The big distros with the highest profile rockstar engineers are choosing to use his software. For real reasons. But if you listen to the peanut gallery, you'd think Poettering is some sort of retarded outlaw in the wilderness who is hated by all. He's not hated by educated people who make a difference in the world. But there is certainly a culture of hate online is communities that purport to be filled with technical professionals. Apparently though, professionals who aren't very professional, or regarded.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @05:09AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @05:09AM (#119322)

        If Poettering is so great, why do so many people have so many problems with the software he's written? PulseAudio was a complete disaster for so many people, just like systemd has been. I can't think of any other open source developer whose software has caused so many people so much trouble.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @06:44AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @06:44AM (#119332)

        Your day must have started in the mid 2000s.

        There has always been profound dislike to be found displayed in a textual form on mailing lists and usenet.

        It is the leftists that wish to imprison those with whom they disagree. In most European countries they
        are given this power.

        There's another thing at work here, with gamer gate et al; there are no anti-feminist countries in existance
        any longer. Virtually no place for men to marry females under the age of western consent. There's no valve or outlet.
        There's only what women want. Everywhere.

      • (Score: 1, Redundant) by Hairyfeet on Monday November 24 2014, @04:23PM

        by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Monday November 24 2014, @04:23PM (#119450) Journal

        Sorry but no, don't try to lump in what corrupt tech reviewers have tried to label as "gamergate" [youtube.com] which just FYI was a snarky post by Alec Baldwin because his former boss Joss Whedon posted that anybody that points out obvious conflicts of interest like Zoe Quinn doxxing a pro female game design group while at the same time raising funds for a "female game jam" with the funds going into her personal account was "anti feminist", because they really aren't the same AT ALL.

        Several supposedly independent "game journalists" got caught red handed with their hands in the cookie jar, not only pushing developers they had personal and financial relationships with but actually getting together in a secret private Google group to decide what got pushed, what got buried, and what agenda they should push. Then when this came out suddenly "its about feminism" with over a dozen sites coming out with the exact same article at the same time labeling gamers as "dead" and trying to make it all about Anita Sarkeesian, a known con artist [youtube.com] who has been caught in so many outright lies about the games she is supposedly "exposing" that she should by all rights have the same amount of credibility as Jack Thompson.

        At the end of the day the reason the press latched onto the "gamergate" tag is because its exactly that...a tag. Something that they can use to discredit the legitimate criticism of their shady dealings because anybody can use that, all it takes is any random jackass (even a member of the gaming press themselves) typing " I hate (insert race or sex) #gamergate" and they can say "See? Its not about us, its about gamers hating (insert group)!" when in reality they were caught red handed [youtube.com] colluding and stuffing their pockets.

        --
        ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
        • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday November 24 2014, @04:49PM

          by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Monday November 24 2014, @04:49PM (#119459) Journal

          sorry to reply to myself but we REALLY need the ability to do minor edits, its ADAM not Alec, too damned many Baldwins to keep up with LOL.

          --
          ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
      • (Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Monday November 24 2014, @05:33PM

        by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Monday November 24 2014, @05:33PM (#119476) Journal

        I agree some people on the Internet are very nasty, though maybe I'm not old enough to see the "recency" you speak of. I think the Greater Internet F*wad Theory has been true for quite some time.

        Regarding Lennart Poettering: he's just an ass. Regardless of the technical merits of his software, he's such an ass that he is, in fact, a "poisonous upstream" the same way Schilling was. Like Schilling, he won't listen to bug reports, and he thinks he's a god. He co-opted someone else's talk on audio systems after heckling the presenter with "questions" that were more comments, including calling Phonon "kind of dead" (which it's not). His whole team is like that, too; remember the "debug on the kernel command line" crap?

        People who come up with crap ideas to solve nonproblems are usually just ignored. Debian users who would like to ignore Lennart are not able to. That makes him disliked. And the guy's an ass, which makes him more disliked.

        And, this isn't something that happens to most OSS developers. You don't have entire threads hating Andrew Morton, or Greg Kroah-Hartman, or even Theo de Raadt, who is extremely unpersonable. Hans Reiser (before he became a murderer) you had a few, because he had the same sort of arrogance Lennart has, but even then people respected the quality of his work, and, well, you didn't HAVE to use ReiserFS.

        By contrast, Lennart does work anyone could do (but doesn't, because it's not useful work), thinks he's the best thing since sliced bread because he solved 5 nonproblems while creating 6 real ones, and is in a position where many people can't just roll their eyes and ignore him if they want to. That is a recipe for pissing people off. And they are.

        It's not the community. It's the software, and the toxic personality behind it.