Re: CoC policy for package contents

Sigh.

s/acceptable conduct/acceptable content/ over this entire email, of
course; "conduct" and "content" are too close for my brain to make the
distinction, apparently...

On Fri, Aug 01, 2025 at 09:33:09AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> The problem with this entire email (and other ones like it elsewhere in
> the thread) is that it ignores that we are already there.
> 
> It is my understanding that fortunes packages with so called 'offensive'
> contents are being removed from the archive for code of conduct
> reasons[1]. The debian changelog aside, this was never the intent of
> the code of conduct, and that means that the code of conduct is being
> abused, today, as a sort of code of acceptable conduct.
> 
> When I said upthread that I thought we should apply the code of conduct
> to some parts of our package archive, it was because I bekieve (and a
> member of the conduct team stated tey agree with that position) that
> things like the debian changelog qualify as Debian conduct and thus fall
> under the CoC. When a package sprouts insults our users or at Debian in
> general, I think we should take reasonable efforts to switch that
> behavior off (e.g., by not shipping sudo with the 'insults' feature on
> by default), but we shouldn't require extensive patching to do so, and
> we shouldn't exclude packages from the archive for that reason.
> 
> Yet, fortunes-off packages have been and are being removed, against the
> package maintainer's explicit wishes, for these reasons. This means that
> we already do have an effective code of acceptable conduct, decided by
> the release team and not the project at large, and I think that is
> wrong.
> 
> I want us to have a vote on this subject so everyone agrees on what is
> expected, but I would want the outcome of that vote to make it clear
> that, with perhaps a few exceptions as stated above, the code of conduct
> does *not* apply to the archive and removing packages for that reason is
> wrong.
> 
> But make no mistake about it: the status quo is not "we have no code of
> acceptable conduct". The status quo is that we do.
> 
> [1] I say 'understanding' because I did not actually check the
>     communication from the release team that happened when these
>     packages were being removed, so all I know is second hand
>     information that may be inaccurate. Even so, that would imply that
>     there is some confusion about this subject, which is a similar
>     problem that a vote could solve, too.
> 
> -- 
> <Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
>   -- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22
> 
>