Re: Phoning home

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

On Sun, 2008-02-24 at 13:54 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> I'm involved in sponsoring a proogram (meshlab, ITP #426581) where
> I've discovered that it phones home with statistical information about
> the files being used, and so forth.  I'm working with upstream and
> with the prospective maintainer to resolve this and I don't think
> there will be any difficulty for the specific package.
> 
> But I was rather surprised to find this situation.  It looks like the
> prospective maintainer was aware of the phoning home but didn't
> consider it a release-critical bug; they are also reluctant to
> override upstream's wishes without some clear Debian policy statement
> to the effect that this is not permissible.

I'm unclear about this "override upstream's wishes" part.  I have heard
this kind of thing a number of times, and I strongly disagree with it.

Debian is not a conduit for upstream packages to get conveniently
compiled for Debian, is it?  It's a coherent system.  Debian maintainers
have the job of making their packages DTRT, whether upstream does that
or not, whether upstream agrees or not.

It should not even be thought of, at all, in terms of "overriding".  It
should be a matter of doing the right thing.  The right thing here seems
abundantly clear, and I have no objection to a suitable statement in
Debian policy.  But that's not the only point...

It sounds as if the maintainer is saying that upstream gets some kind of
veto, which can only be overridden if there is a "clear Debian policy
statement" on the point, and that is a mistaken and buggy approach.
Upstream doesn't get a veto.

There are good social and technical reasons not to deviate from upstream
without good reasons, but this is a good reason, whether there is a
"clear policy" or not.

Thomas