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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) by Pav on Monday November 24 2014, @11:54PM
Joey Hess and others on the "winning" side of the systemd debate quit anyway. This was because the "new" 2008 constitution encouraged politicking over the old way ie. consensus. If both sides of an argument know that consensus is the required endpoint things tend towards being a little more civil, and encourages a more genuine discussion. The new constitution enables speedier decisions via votes, but at the expense of social cohesion. This is wrong for a project like Debian. Developers can now push their vision by simply "getting the numbers". This is dissolving the community as it is repeatedly bisected by issues which aren't properly "resolved". It was the old bias towards genuine communication/consensus which made Debian a top (although more conservative) distro in the first place.