I'm very sympathetic to Ukraine and the desire to demonstrate or speak out, but I don't see how this instance is very effective, and doing it has a significant cost to the integrity of Debian, as this argument says:
> Russ Allbery agreed that the DFSG was not relevant; he also warned that citing the Social Contract and DFSG ""turns the conversation into rules lawyering without addressing the actual issue"". However, even though xsnow is DFSG-compliant, he did say that the flag display may be something Debian does not want in its archives:
> > I would, in general, say that software that behaves in deceptive ways, which includes hidden behavior changes based on usernames, locales, or other local settings or information that no user would reasonably expect to change behavior in this way is probably not something that we want to have in Debian. It's a very slippery slope and also likely to create a lot of drama to very little benefit.
It is interesting to read M. Allbery's comment side by side with the discussion here on Hacker News about a CLAUDE.EXE program with hidden behaviour that subtly changes the way that it outputs an information banner based upon timezones, hostnames, and domain names.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373
Further LWN commentary (as observed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518) is that the result would not be solely drama but potentially some fairly nasty real world consequences for some people.
The simple solution that should make everyone happy is to simply document it. That way it is no longer a hidden behavior, and the Debian maintainer could even do that as a patch without the help of upstream.
That might be responding too narrowly to this objection.
Then there's the question of singling out some subset of Debian users based on their country, for different behavior they presumably don't want and that is against their individual interests (see the other comment, about displaying a flag getting you beaten).
The solution is to treat everyone fairly and honestly, and to set an example for how people can get along. Imagine Debian is an international space station: the astronauts will help each other, not bicker and backstab. There are other venues for conflicts.
The deceptive aspect is the stronger part of the objection. Banning any and all political messages in Debian packages would go too far and I doubt the community would support it. People and in extension developers, can be quite political active and will put some of that into their works. I am sure (as in I don't need to verify) that the pride flag is somewhere in Debian right now, in some package, and banning it would cause much more conflict than allowing it to remain where it is. The problem really only exist if people would have it shoved into their faces through deception.
An other example of political message is when projects redirect donations to a cause. Should projects be banned from having a "donate to Ukraine" somewhere in a program, maybe with a Ukraine flag next to it?
The maintainer and upstream are the same person