[Posting this with new subject so it doesn't get lost in the big flamewar] Dear Developer community, First, sit back please and get a glass of the drink you like most. That might have become necessary after the flamewar that took place here in last days. After my proposal for removing the mICQ package from Debian unstable, there have been many different opinions on the ML to this. Some had slightly different ideas, others had ideas that were completely different from the one that I suggested. Let me summarize the bits that I was able to collect out of the flames. 1) Some agreed to my proposal to simply have the package removed from archive. They mainly gave as reasons for that the we don't know what upstream author might do next and that this was simply working actively against debian. 2) Some people suggested to simply remove the offending lines from the source code and go ahead. 3) Remove the package for now, make code audit and get it back in after that. 4) "Gabucino" hadn't really had something useful to add but put his oar in anyway. Thanks for that, Sir! As most of you probably know, the reason for this piece of code in the main source code was a conflict between the upstream author of mICQ, Ruediger Kuhlmann, and me. I admit that i bear the blame for a great part of this conflict (and also for the situation resulting from this conflict which we face now), but I also think that for keeping an argument alive there are 2 persons necessary. Anyway, today I decided that it was time to break up this argument. I contacted Ruediger via ICQ and we had a talk about the problem itself and how to solve it best. Ruediger was very cooperative during the talk. I am glad to say that we finally cleared all things out. Please don't missunderstand me - having the problems fixed does not help the project in any way with the mICQ issue, but I am happy that we were able to clear out things just like human beings do. Just as a side note, Ruediger has promised to remove the code in preferences.c from CVS. Thanks for that. After all this boring stuff, we should come to the real important question now: What should happen with mICQ? I decided to do it the following way: 1) Get mICQ removed from archive for now. 2) I suggest a code auditing. So far, two people (Namely Martin Godisch and Robert Lemmen) have volunteered to audit the code. If they are still willing to do that (Give feedback please!), they should start and try to get it done as fast as possible. 3) If they finished to audit the code, they should write a short report (preferably to debian-devel) and tell us what they have found. 4) If there is nothing else offensive, there is no reason for not adding mICQ back to the archive. As Ruediger already pointed out, i won't take the package back after code audit anyway because i stopped to use mICQ. Any final comments on this? -- .''`. Name: Martin Loschwitz : :' : E-Mail: madkiss@madkiss.org `. `'` www: http://www.madkiss.org/ `- Use Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org/
Attachment:
pgpprd4m5PZ13.pgp
Description: PGP signature