On Sat, Aug 19, 2023 at 07:11:11PM +0200, Dominik George wrote: > >The mission you have chosen for yourself, then, is to identify all those > >things in the Debian distribution that are not constitutive of an > >operating system. > > That is a major part of the work of a Debian Developer, and the ftp-master > team. > But we have established criteria, so perhaps we should focus on ensuring existing and new packages meet the established criteria and, where needed, we update the critieria via the appropriate mechanism.
> Packages are evaluated for eligibility to enter the distribution all the > time, we had times where every new binary package was frowned upon due to > resource constraints on the archive. > And "our infrastructure must be able to host everything we intend to distribute" is one of our established, and very sensible, criteria. > If I uploaded fortunes-natureshadow because I think my favourite quotes are > worth being shipped with an operating system, I am pretty sure it would get > rejected. > I am pretty sure that you would be wrong. In my experience, the FTP masters take their jobs very seriously and they have a well established practice of clearly communicating the reasons for rejecting packages. Again, these reasons are not arbitrary, but rather they are governed by established criteria (e.g., license suitability, package name collisions, archive space constraints, etc). At the same time, removals also are governed by existing criteria. Things like lack of maintainer attention, causing disruption to other packages in the distribution, and similar, are TTBOMK valid reasons for removing a package. The reasons why the FTP masters might reject a package from the archive are public [0]. Nowhere on the list is there an entry that says "somebody doesn't like this package" or "it has stuff that might offend someone" as a valid reason to either prevent a package entering Debian or to precipitate its removal. > There is no reason to handle fortunes-off any different. > Agreed, if you mean "there is no reason to handle fortunes-off any differently from any other package". While a great deal of the content in fortunes-off is personally offensive to me (as is the case with content in the other packages I noted elsewhere in this thread), using the Code of Conduct as a justification for its removal is absolutely wrong. The content in those packages cannot, by any reasonable stretch, be considered to fall within the scope of the Code of Conduct. So, if there is a valid technical or policy reason for excluding the package, then by all means go ahead (and good riddance to the package). But if there is not, let's not abuse the Code of Conduct or any other unrelated policy just because it makes a few people feel good. If you really want to see those packages gone because they give you or someone the wrong feels then it is necessary to first establish the policy under which such can be done, because there is currently no such policy. If, instead, the Code of Conduct is successfully weaponized in order to force the removal of any package from the project, then it will simply be proof that the fears of those who warned that the existence of the Code of Conduct would eventually lead to its abuse and weaponization may have in fact been well founded. Regards, -Roberto [0] https://ftp-master.debian.org/REJECT-FAQ.html -- Roberto C. Sánchez
