Dominik George <[email protected]> writes: > Hi, > >>tech-ctte rules on *technical* issues, so this doesn't really seem >>within their mandate. And the community team has no powers on the >>contents of packages. > > It occurred to me, on several occasions, that noone in Debian (short > of its members via a GR) is responsible for overseeing the Social > Contract. Maybe with all the topics of these days (AI and its > consequences, facsism,…), it's time for some sort of ethical council, > and for updating the Social Contract?
I think this issue is somewhat similar to the advertisement concern with gnome-control-center: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1136336 In both packages, there is no real clear guidance from Debian Policies what is deemed to be acceptable contents within a package. It seems both these issues could be helped by better guidance on matters of acceptable package content. Personally, I would find it really problematic if we would have a hard policy to filter packages depending on political, religious, philosophical etc views of the upstream author. That's a slippery slope to motivate excluding just about anything, depending on your own political/religious/philosophical/etc preferences. That said, I also have sympathy with the goal to shepherd an inclusive and friendly atmosphere and Operating System that promotes the spirit of the DSC/DFSG. Having a package that display a really provocative message to the user inside Debian seems problematic and warrant discussion and possibly some action. Maybe we don't need to bike-shed the engineering approach to social concerns by defining a rigid policy document. Social issues cannot always be resolved by technical procedures. Thus, I propose to write down some guiding principle on this, with examples of clearly offensive content that maintainers should be patching out. It doesn't have to be a hard policy, but a guiding principle around a complex social topic. Such a document would encourage good social behaviour, and maybe we could have a committe that guide maintainers on these matters is useful as a escalation point different to the tech-ctte. FWIW, Petter did patch out the offensive messages here, which seems somewhat reasonable. Dropping the Homepage URL may be warranted in this situation too, but it could also be an over-reaction that is counter-productive for end-users. Repacking the upstream source code without the offensive message could be done, but also has negative consequences for auditing costs and maintainance. /Simon
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