How to do Samba: Nicely

Well, there's two separate parts to it. Section 1.2 is for any member of the community, and that part seems useless - most of the relevant rules are so vague that it's little more than "don't annoy the project leader else he might tell you off or eventually ban you". That's the status quo in any community with a leader and no CoC.

Section 2 is only for core developers, and that's the stupid part. It's a copy of rules for monks in a medieval monastery, and might be helpful in that context, and maybe someone aspires to live their own life like that, but it's clearly not appropriate as a software project's CoC.

CoCs are useful because they try to protect people from the needlessly harmful conduct of others, to help large diverse groups work together productively. SQLite's rules mostly aren't about interactions between people, they're about individual behaviour ("Devote yourself frequently to prayer", "Be not a great eater") and thought policing ("Be in dread of hell"), so there's no need for them to be in a CoC. It does say "we make no enforcement of the introspective aspects", but they're still included in the list of rules and they significantly distract from the potentially relevant ones.

Many are redundant with basic laws ("Do not murder"), so there's no need for them either. Some are not understandable to a modern reader (I don't know what "Be a stranger to the world's ways" means, and after finding some books and essays that discuss it I get the impression nobody else knows either). Some aren't applicable in the modern world ("Make peace with your adversary before the sun sets" - the latency of email discussion makes it hard to resolve any conflict in a single day. And you might not even know what timezone your adversary lives in, so which sunset should you use?)

And the ones that are relevant to interactions within the community are mostly vague and subjective. E.g "Do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself." - several people in LWN comments have said they like it when Linus swears abusively at them, because that's the only way they can tell he's being serious, so that rule lets them swear at other people too. And as far as I can tell, there's nothing that clearly forbids e.g. homophobic behaviour, as long as you love them and pray for them while calling their lives sinful. That's not comforting to people who are thinking about joining the community and want some assurance they'll be accepted.

If they replaced the whole list of 72 rules with one saying "Be nice", that would be about as helpful. Plus it wouldn't be as off-putting to anyone who's not a Christian fundamentalist.

I assumed it was facetious just because it seems plausible they thought something like "I don't like all these new CoCs that are full of inappropriate left-wing political ideas; I'd rather not have one at all but I have to so let's make one that's full of inappropriate right-wing religious ideas to show them how fundamentally flawed the whole concept of CoCs is". Not that that's a good argument, but it seems better than the alternative that they think this is actually a good CoC, and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.