I say "it ought to be obvious", because Hans put the message in there intending it to be prominent, rather than (say) putting it in a doc file. It is reasonable to assume that he cared about putting this message in front of everyone who used it. If you can't understand why removing it would annoy him then I really doubt your ability to cooperate with other people.
You have to realize, we still don't know that you're correct about what he's upset about, becuase Hans has not yet come out and said exactly what the problem is. One early message he posted in this thread indicated to me that his real problem was the lack of
the author list in the Debian package of reiserfsprogs.And in any event, I don't think debian-devel is the place for him to air his concerns. Except in extreme cases, we don't overrule a package maintainer's decision to package the software he maintains however he likes. I don't see any indication he has tried unsuccessfully to air his concerns with the maintainer, either via private email, or by filing a bug, so regardless of our opinons, I don't see that at this point, any of us can do much more than generate more material for a flamewar.
I have sent Hans private email, suggesting that he try to work this out off-list before resorting to what appeared to me to be a rather vitriolic email as a first approach to the project as a whole. I don't see that any of the discussion that is going on at this point is going to affect in any way the contents of the reiserfsprogs package, and certainly not in a way that Hans would like.
Consider: you don't know what Hans doesn't like. You don't know how he'd like things to change. You don't know what he'd consider acceptable, or not. Nor do any of us, because he still hasn't said. As a result, about all we can do as a project is comment on whether or not what the maintainer did is allowable, and it appears that removing the message from mkreiserfs is, but deleting the contributors list isn't (though that appears to be unintentional). We can, as individual members, comment on how we feel about what happened, but given that we don't know exactly what Hans is upset about, even that is perhaps a bit presumptuous.
I suggest we try to give this a rest until Hans can come up with a clear statement of what's wrong, and preferably one that includes his attempts to resolve things privately and the results thereof, before we generate too much more flameage. Once we know what the actual problem is, we can consider what solutions might exist.
As it is, I don't see how we can do anything but fuel the flames. -=Eric