I'm not sure why this is on d-devel and CC'ed to leader@, but let me try to
answer in simple terms, as a random DD.
Le mercredi, 16 juillet 2025, 19.42:06 h CEST Salvo Tomaselli a écrit :
> QUESTIONS
> =========
>
> 1. Can the community team force me to remove a package, even though I
> did not violate the COC and they did not receive any complaints?
No. The CT doesn't have any delegated powers to force anyone to do anything;
they are a group of DDs trying to make the Debian project community a better
place to be in, with the support of the DPL (through a delegation) and (I
strongly believe) of vast majority of the Debian community (not only DDs).
> 2. Can they set important priority on bugs while in freeze, about
> something that has existed for the past 22 years? What's the sudden
> urgency?
Yes. As anyone with an opinion interacting within the project. I believe it's
socially and technically OK for me to go and set any bug's priority as I see
fit. The maintainer and me (and likely others, such as the release team) can
then have a conversation about the severity.
That said… I have quickly skimmed through the two bugs you mentionned
(#1109165 & #1109167) and I don't find them particularly well documented; they
refer to the fact the -off fortunes were removed in english, which brought me
to #1024501 and #1076363, in which the conversation isn't particularly
enlightening. It seems there was a conversation somewhere at the end of 2022,
which led to the removal of the fortunes-off package in english. Without re-
reading all that history, I think that if the project consensus (not
unanimity) is that fortunes-off(ensive) ought to be removed in english, it
also follows that they ought to be removed in other languages.
A last point about your questions: obviously, the sudden urgency is that the
project is getting really close to migrating all packages in testing to our
next stable release. And what happened is that Paul, *with his delegated
Release Team hat on*, reopened the bugs with their current severity and a
rationale (and it's the delegated powers of the Release Team to decide what
goes in the stable release). Today's status of the bugs is from Release Team,
not Andrew (or the CT).
> 3. (…)
> 4. (…)
> 5. (…)
> 6. (…)
> 7. (…)
I read that you're frustrated because a package that you care about is
requested to be removed from the Debian archive, for reasons that you don't
agree with.
Let me offer you a different perspective: through the past conversations
around the offensive variant of the fortunes packages (in english), the
project has converged towards considering that this is not a package that it
wants to ship to its users. (How this convergence happened, and whether you
agree with the end-result are not relevant.) The dataset still exists in the
world, and users who want to get their hands on it don't need Debian to ship
it (of course, it was convenient as a package, that's why we package things in
the first place). Now it was recently noticed by Andrew that the same package
existed in other language variants, and he (not using his CT hat) has
therefore filed two serious bugs asking the package maintainers to remove the
*-off binary packages from their corresponding source packages. And this was
then echo'ed by a Release Team delegate effectively saying "remove this or it
will not ship in Debian stable" (serious severity).
I think both Andrew and Paul reflect the project consensus (again, not
unanimity) that was reached about the fortunes-off package in english: it's
not a package the Debian project wants to ship to its users. This is now a
request from the Release Team, not the Community Tema.
Now, I think you have two options:
A) escalate further. debian-devel conversations are calls to mobilisation (and
is already triggering a too-long thread there), but concretely, the only
recourse you have is to convince the rest of the Release Team to override
Paul's decision. I think we all know how this is going to end (spoiler alert:
the Release Team will kick the whole fortunes-it and fortunes-scn source
packages out of testing if they need to).
B) get over it, remove the offensive binary packages from the source packages,
close these two serious bugs and move on. Then if it *really* is that
important for you, work upstream to make the offensive "jokes" more accessible
without involving Debian packages or infrastructure.
Really, I'd echo what Charles has written and encourage you to really decide
whether this is a fight worth fighting. And I'd really encourage you to not
try making this an issue of the Community Team's existence or members' actions
(which it clearly isn't).
Best,
--
OdyX
