A dust-up in OpenMandriva’s dev ranks escalates from abusive chats to vanished repositories and a ‘saboteur’ package that threatens Gnome and Cosmic users.
It’s probably occurred to somebody in charge at OpenMandriva by now that it might have been a good idea to have kept a backup on ice of its repository. This is after a couple of hooligan developers threw a costly hissy fit and vandalized the distro’s repository. According to a post by AngryPenguin from the distro’s development team, the incident revolves around Davide Beatrici, a developer who came to the project by way of the open source messaging app Mumble.
OpenMandriva and Mageia are about as close as you can come these days to touching the roots of Mandrake, which is seen by many as the first attempt at user-friendly Linux. It was also the distro that many fondly remember as their first Linux. OpenMandriva started life as a fork of Mandriva, which is what Mandrake became when it bought and merged with the Brazilian distro Conectiva.
Although the incident began a few days back, as AngryPenguin tells it the whole story goes back a bit further, to when Beatrici joined the OpenMandriva team.
“The team had no hesitation in trusting him; after all, he was such a well-known figure that we didn’t expect anything bad. Although Davide didn’t make many contributions to the system, he offered to migrate our repository infrastructure from GitHub to his private instance, OneDev. He even performed a backup/mirror of several dozen of our repositories.”
Hmmm… I’m guessing you have an idea where this is going.
“Some of the team had mixed feelings, as we didn’t want to place our repository in the private hands of one person. We preferred a publicly available infrastructure like GitHub currently has.”
Mixed feelings, at this point, seems more than somewhat appropriate.
The Saga in a Nutshell…
To make a long story short, two other people joined the distribution alongside Davide, which AngryPenguin said is “where the problem began.” That may be true, but the story ends with the ball in Beatrici’s court — almost entirely.
Anyway, one of the newcomers became so abusive with “certain” team members that several quit and left the distribution. It was allowed to get that far, according to AngryPenguin, because some of the conversations leading to the split didn’t happen on the distro’s forums, but in private messages.
“When another person was attacked in our chat and on GitHub, I decided to take action and kicked the attacker out of the chat.
I didn’t ban him, just kicked him out of one of the chats (specifically, the matrix chat for the OpenMandriva-Cooker channel).…
This triggered a cascade of events. In protest, two people left the distribution, including Davide, a friend of the attacker.”
At this point, I would say that this looks something like a comedy of errors, although I’m certain that OpenMandriva’s dev crew cleaning up after what happened next would object to the term “comedy.”
This is also where the story turns a bit nightmarish.
AngryPenguin, “no longer seeing any point in maintaining a mirror to Davide’s private infrastructure,” cut the connection, at least “to the mirrors that were in the packages of which I am maintainer.” This angered Beatrici, who unfortunately still had administration rights to OpenMandriva’s infrastructure. “He sabotaged the distribution” in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.
Aftermath
“He deleted part of our repository from GitHub — things we’d been working on for many years, and I myself had been working on for a decade. Davide also decided to publish an empty package in the cooker repository, which obsoleted all Gnome and Cosmic packages, which could have damaged the systems of people using Gnome or Cosmic.”
At the time of Wednesday’s report, the OpenMandriva dev team was working to restore the deleted repositories and the functionality of the obsolete packages. In the aftermath, although OpenMandriva is officially located in France, they seem to be following the adage of a former US First Lady who’s known for saying, “When they go low, we go higher.”
“We understand that Davide’s actions were unacceptable and shameful, and that we could have pursued legal action because Davide’s actions constituted a criminal offense, but we have decided not to do so.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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