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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @03:45AM
So WHY not write any of those perfectly fine arguments you came up with in 10 seconds, instead of writing troll?
the packaging request is being sent from a mailinator address (@sogetthis.com), which is an anonymous throw-away email provider.
A simple "We don't consider package request from anonymous email addresses" would've been fine for this particular request.
If the submitter is a troll, he'll have to try harder next time.
the code itself has stuff like ASCII spam of "Just Say No To Women's Rights" as a response to certain user input
This could be another simple response, ala "Why is this in a slot machine app?".
And then there are all the actual code issues you pointed out. All valid arguments. All ignored in favor of "troll".
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday November 24 2014, @04:38AM
So WHY not write any of those perfectly fine arguments you came up with in 10 seconds, instead of writing troll?
If you want an answer to that, you'd do better by asking the people that were involved. There were two (the one that made the comment, and the one that closed the bug as WONTFIX), and I doubt either one reads SN.
I almost ignored the whole thing because it's clearly part of the same anti-Debian crusade as some of the other submissions (including attempts to submit the same things to Slashdot), but the code itself was hilarious, so I changed my mind and decided it'd be funny to wade into the muck.