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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: 3, Informative) by Marand on Monday November 24 2014, @04:23AM
Summary also left out that the request to add the software to Debian is from a domain that's handled by mailinator (an anonymous mailer), so even the attempt to get it added was probably a troll. (It's even listed in their blog post [blogspot.com] about alternate domains.) I doubt the summary would have included any of this info, though, because it wouldn't fit the Debian-hostile narrative. Searching online shows that an AC attempted to submit the same thing to Slashdot, too. It's just someone with an agenda, possibly even the same guy that made the software and attempted to get it added to Debian.
Something else I've noticed: every time one of these AC-submitted Debian-hostile posts comes up there's a slew of similarly-toned AC comments defending the submission and arguing with everybody that comments. I think this guy's got a hell of an axe to grind, is insanely bored, or is just insane. Maybe some combination of the three.
A better discussion would be about how terrible the code is. I listed a few things in another comment [soylentnews.org], but there's probably stuff I missed because I was just jumping to random points and looking at the horribleness.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @12:53PM
Debian has screwed up a lot lately, and it has been reported here and on other sites, so somehow this means there's some huge conspiracy? Huh?
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday November 24 2014, @03:48PM
for some strange reason your post made me laugh!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @10:45PM
It made me laugh, too. Marand's conspiracy theories are silly.