Problematic [LWN.net]

Problematic

Posted Jun 29, 2026 15:51 UTC (Mon) by cen (subscriber, #170575)
Parent article: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

The way I see it, this is a slippery slope and should be banned by policy. Any change that is done to the upstream package which has no real technical merit but essentially introduces political messaging sounds problematic. You could then have a Russian maintainer inserting some other changes in some other package and open up maintainer wars reflecting real life conflicts (Iran, Palestine, Israel etc etc). If Debian ships such packages in their official repos it implicitly endorses such changes as a project.

to post comments

Problematic

Posted Jun 29, 2026 16:03 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (6 responses)

Note that the code in question is also in the upstream package. It's not a Debian-specific modification.

Problematic

Posted Jun 29, 2026 16:40 UTC (Mon) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (4 responses)

Sorry if that did not come through clearly enough in the article. Yes, it's in upstream xsnow as well. Not sure exactly which version it landed in, but it's not unique to Debian.

Problematic

Posted Jun 29, 2026 21:42 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (3 responses)

The Debian maintainer is the upstream author, AFAICS.
However, as I said, as long as nobody is willing to fill a bug report, the issue is moot.
It seems a bit dishonest to complain to debian-devel without ever bothering to fill a bug report, IMHO.

Problematic

Posted Jun 30, 2026 20:45 UTC (Tue) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (2 responses)

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1141182

Problematic

Posted Jun 30, 2026 21:52 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

Your bug report is short on technical detail. You do not explain how to reproduce the bug or what exactly happens.
I do not see how Debian can fix it.

Problematic

Posted Jul 1, 2026 17:17 UTC (Wed) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link]

Apparently, it was enough for the author/maintainer, as he's considered the alternatives and decided to remove the protestware.

Problematic

Posted Jun 29, 2026 16:59 UTC (Mon) by cen (subscriber, #170575) [Link]

I wasn't aware this was an upstream change. That changes things and makes my comment irrelavant. Thanks for the clarification.

Problematic

Posted Jun 29, 2026 17:47 UTC (Mon) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (2 responses)

You'll have to take away "ip moo" from my cold, dead hands

Problematic

Posted Jun 29, 2026 23:18 UTC (Mon) by ATLief (subscriber, #166135) [Link]

apt moo

apt moo moo

apt moo moo moo

Problem-apt-ic

Posted Jun 30, 2026 6:03 UTC (Tue) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]

Can i haz sponsor for systemd-moosay?

K3n.

Problematic

Posted Jun 30, 2026 14:03 UTC (Tue) by patrakov (subscriber, #97174) [Link] (2 responses)

Debian already had a case in the past where they removed a package with early protestware - but in that earlier case, it was a protest by upstream against Debian packaging practices. Upstream deliberately broke the package for every Debian user except the maintainer. I am talking about micq.

mICQ

Posted Jun 30, 2026 14:06 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

That episode was, of course, covered here at the time.

Problematic - article in question

Posted Jun 30, 2026 14:06 UTC (Tue) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

Huh. I had either missed that or have completely forgotten about it... either is entirely possible. Looks like we covered it, though: "The trojaning of mICQ", February 18, 2003. Wish I'd known/remembered it when I was writing the article; that would have been a good thing to include. Thank you much for the comment!