Andreas Metzler <[email protected]> writes: > Looking at the CoC again imho it just does not apply to this > purpose. The CoC is all about interaction between people while this is > more like a one-way-street.
Yes, I think I agree. I don't think the contents of packages *within the Debian context* are very usefully defined as conduct in the sense of our code of conduct. Conduct, in that context, is generally the behavior of someone within a community that one voluntarily joins. It's an effort to formalize the mutual expectations among people who are part of that community. It's the rules or guidelines that we've agreed to try to follow so that we can get along with each other even though we disagree (including, often, about the merits of some of the rules or guidelines). It's ideally the result of a process of mutual negotiation within the standards of a community. Packages are different because by definition most of them are not coming from part of our community. The authors are usually not engaged with any of that process and usually don't want to be. As you say, it's a one-way thing: Debian decides what we do and don't want to package, and that's largely outside of the control or influence of upstream. And, similarly, upstream decides what they want to put into their packages and that's outside the *control* of Debian, except to decide not to package the software. (We can *ask*, of course, but that's not control.) Also, I don't think our users largely consider the contents of packages provided by upstream to reflect our community. That's not what Debian is for: we're trying to provide a functional Linux distribution and our primary emphasis is on that functionality. I think there's a pretty deep understanding among our users that we're responsible for the packaging and integration, and to some extent the selection, but the upstream authors are responsible for the content of the software. Although we might deal with something particularly egregious, we're not generally going to try to fork upstreams to try to make them follow an internal Debian code of conduct. Even apart from the serious questions of whether this would be justifiable, I think it's obviously impractical. I think it's important to not over-promise what we're willing to do with packages, and starting from our own code of conduct I think would run a danger of over-promising. Unless something about a package is particularly "in your face," I think we're generally going to prioritize functionality and compatibility with the rest of the Linux ecosystem, even if we really dislike the behavior of some of our upstreams. > I would rather have something much narrower which could not be misused > to e.g. prevent shipping doom. Yes, these sorts of conversations are usually quite contentious and draining and I think we have a limited capacity as a project to sign up for a whole lot of them, so it feels worth the effort up front to narrow the rules down to the things we really care about. There have been a few cases in the past where the behavior of an upstream is particularly egregious (harassing Debian maintainers, for instance) or sophmoric, and I think I remember at least one case where it was pretty obvious that upstream was going out of their way to make their software offensive just to annoy people. I think it might be helpful to have a packaging policy that says we're not willing to put up with that sort of thing. But there are going to be lots of places where bits and pieces of upstream software (particularly expressive and creative upstream software such as games, as you point out) don't fit the sorts of standards that Debian would apply to interactions inside the project, and I think that's fine. Comparing Debian directly to a public library probably goes too far, in that we are trying to create a unified distribution and don't have the same public mission of collecting as broad of a range of human expression as possible, but I think there's some part of the same basic impetus at work. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
