Re: [debian-devel] Doom of Debian Re: Debian Weekly News - February 18th, 2003
> Martin Schulze wrote:
> >Removing mICQ from Debian? Martin Loschwitz [16]proposed to remove
> >[17]mICQ from Debian entirely since the upstream author has placed a
> >harmful and [18]obfuscated easter egg in the code, bypassing the
> >maintainer's testing. Anthony Towns [19]asked all maintainers to
> >review upstream changes before packaging code, Branden Robinson
> >already [20]reads every line of diff that gets applied to his XFree86
> >packages. Rüdiger Kuhlmann later [21]reported that the problems were
> >resolved and that the easter egg was replaced. Martin Loschwitz also
> >sent an [22]update.
Actually, I take offence in this news, since it leaves out large chunks of
relevant facts.
1) The whole trouble started with the mICQ maintainer beeing extremely to
the upstream author (that's me). He ignored pretty much any request and
bug report. Also, he removed my name from the copyright file!
(the issues with him have been sorted out, that's what "the problems were
resolved" refers to)
(the package with the wrong copyright file is still in Debian/stable.
Debian hasn't reacted properly to this copyright violation in more than
three months.)
2) The easter egg wasn't harmfull by any stretch. It printed a message where
to get the upstream .deb and exited. It was also only compiled in by
someone modifying the packaging agains my multiple times expressed will.
If the Debian project has problems with copyright and slander, then checking
upstream diffs is one of it's lesser problems.
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mailto:ruediger@ruediger-kuhlmann.de
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