[jeroenhd]

All of these reasons are good, but they're not comprehensive. Unless someone can tell me what category Debian's alterations to xscreensaver fall under, maybe. As far as I can tell, that was just done for aesthetic reasons and packagers disagreeing with upstream.

[pabs3]

The patches and their explanations are listed here:

https://udd.debian.org/patches.cgi?src=xscreensaver&version=...

Edit: can't find any that are for aesthetic reasons.

[mnau]

91_remove_version_upgrade_warnings.patch is the one for asthetic reasons.

Debian keeps ancient versions that have many fixed bugs. Upstream maintainer has to deal with fallout of bug reports of obsolete version. To mitigate his workload, he added obsolete version warning. Debian removed it.

[quietbritishjim]

I'll admit that I haven't inspected the patch, but how could that warning possibly work without checking version information somewhere on the internet? That was listed in OP.

[sneak]

IIRC it just hardcodes the release date and complains if it is more than 2 or 3 years later.

It’s somewhat reasonable. I agree Debian should patch out phone-home and autoupdate (aka developer RCE). They should have left the xscreensaver local-only warning in, though. It is not a privacy or system integrity issue.

jwz however is also off the rails with entitlement.

They’re both wrong.

[mschuster91]

> jwz however is also off the rails with entitlement.

Always remember to not link to his site from HN because you'll get a testicle NSFW image when you click on a link to his site from HN. dang used to have rel=noreferrer on outgoing links, but that led to even more drama with other people...

Some people in the FOSS scene just love to stir drama, and jwz is far from the only one. Another person with such issues IMHO is the systemd crowd, although in this case ... IMHO it's excusable to a degree, as they're trying to solve real problems that make life difficult for everyone.

[esperent]

> Always remember to not link to his site from HN because you'll get a testicle NSFW image

What's his reason for targeting HN users this way?

[mnau]

People unfamiliar with code base can easily screw it, here is SimplePie example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44061563

I don't think that approach is reasonable. When you are effectively making a fork, don't freeload on existing project name and burden him with problems you cause.