On Thu, 14 May 2026 12:13, Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> wrote:
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?
+1
The gnome-control-center popup is a non-issue IMO since KDE also has a donation banner, just not as frequent.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 mattersThere is a stark contrast between asking for donations and having obvious hateful content in a package (and yes, that includes the homepage).of acceptable package content.
TTBOMK we do not have a clear policy on this, but we should. The DFSG already provides the framework, it's just not enforced yet.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.
I like to point out the tolerance paradoxon here [0]. No one is suggesting to remove packages just on a whim; however distributing what is obviously hateful content does not fit the project values at all. Especially when it's such a clear-cut case. The very minimum would be to remove the homepage.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.
Well, the DFSG exits, we just don't have it mandating actions for packages (which IMO should be discussed).
I'd like to point out §5 here [1].
I fail to see how this is an overreaction; users *really* wanting to visit the homepage can always look it up themselves.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.
best,
werdahias
{0} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
[1] https://www.debian.org/social_contract
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