Bug of feature?

Agreed. The way that one starts establishing such shared standards is to state what standards one would like to see and see how other members of the project react to them, which is what I did in the post cited all the way back in the original LWN article. Usually this process takes a long time and multiple separate events, and often the consensus is somewhat informal and takes a long time to be written down formally (if it ever is).

My stance is that I don't particularly care about "discrimination" because it means too many different things to different people, some of which I sharply disagree with. But I don't think we should include software that intentionally deceives the user about what it's going to do by, for instance, hiding behavior behind triggers that the user would not expect to have an effect. This is a very minor instance of that general principle, and thus not the greatest test case and probably not the package that will create a lot of consensus, but it's a good opportunity to state the principle and ask people to think about it. I'm sure this will come up again.

> Debian (and its developers/packagers) doesn't make any general promises about the software it ships

And indeed we should not, for a whole bunch of reasons including the obvious legal ones.

> Debian doesn't promise any particular outcome, just a best effort towards its stated/shared goals, and a process to achieve (and participate in) that.

Exactly. We are trying to do a bunch of things that we do not promise we will succeed at. This is, in general, how societies work and how mutual trust is built. Very few of the assumptions of trust are based on formal or enforceable promises. A lot is just good faith effort and attempts to avoid forseeable problems.