On the recommendation of a friend on a business themed social network, I have just sent the following email to owners@bugs.debian.org about my experiences on the Debian bug tracker recently. It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it.
To: owner@bugs.debian.org
From: mikal@stillhq.com
Subject: Complaint regarding conduct on bug 1132795
Hi,
I am the author and maintainer of pngtools, a PNG image tooling package
that has been packaged by Debian for a long time. I have recently
experienced conduct from Debian developers and users on
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1132795 that I believe
falls outside of the bounds of what is expected by the Debian Code of
Conduct.
I have three overall concerns:
* the general conduct of the users and the author of the patch.
* the failure to meaningfully engage with the upstream developer -- for
example providing an upstream bug report with more than minimal detail,
a justification apart from "it's pointless" when upstream disagreed with
the assessment of the behaviour as a bug.
* the Debian package maintaining a cosmetic patch against the Debian
packaged version of the software without a strong justification.
I understand that sometimes in-distro patches are needed, but I do not
think that is the case here. I also think that in a world where attacks
like xz seek to insert deliberate vulnerabilities into packages, that
Debian should be extremely conservative about what patches they layer on
top of upstream and what justifies those patches.
I wrote further about my concerns with this incident at
"https://www.madebymikal.com/is-this-the-standard-of-behavior-we-get-from-debian-now/"
if you need further detail.
Thanks,
Michael