OpenMandriva's accused repo wrecker says it wasn't sabotage – it was a message

SOFTWARE

Ex-contributor claims he wasn't a rogue admin, hadn't left the project, and never intended to harm the distro

The contributor accused by OpenMandriva of sabotaging its Linux distribution says he deliberately deleted repositories and obsoleted packages, but insists the project has badly misrepresented both his motives and his role.

Last week, OpenMandriva accused Davide Beatrici of abusing administrative privileges to delete parts of the project's GitHub repositories and publish an empty package in its Cooker development branch that obsoleted GNOME and COSMIC packages. The distro described the incident as an attempted "distribution sabotage" and said it had considered legal action.

Beatrici doesn't dispute carrying out the changes, but he disagrees with much of OpenMandriva's account.

"Let me state right away that this was by no means a 'sabotage'; I'm not the kind of person to do something like that," Beatrici told The Register. "The objective was not to harm the distribution I cared for and contributed to for the past three years."

He acknowledged deleting the GNOME and COSMIC repositories from GitHub, removing the corresponding packages from the Cooker development branch, and publishing a package that obsoleted them. But he said the changes were intended as a protest after maintainers removed OneDev configuration files from multiple repositories without consulting him, effectively disabling work he had been doing on a new build and mirroring infrastructure.

"In short: my action was meant to launch a message," he said. "Repositories and packages can be restored fairly easily. The package I pushed simply causes the removal of the obsoleted desktop environments."

OpenMandriva's original statement said Beatrici acted by "abusing" the "administrative privileges he still had," implying he retained access after leaving the project. Beatrici rejects that too.

"That's absolutely not the case," he said. "I was never meant to abandon the distribution, in fact I continued with my tasks kind of ignoring what was going on in the Matrix rooms."

He also pushed back on OpenMandriva's account of the project's internal dispute, saying the project's president, Bernhard Rosenkränzer, repeatedly tried to broker a compromise between contributors before relations collapsed.

Beyond the disagreement itself, Beatrici painted a bleak picture of OpenMandriva's technical foundations, describing much of the distro's build infrastructure as outdated and saying he had spent considerable time contributing patches to OneDev and developing a replacement package build pipeline.

OpenMandriva did not respond to questions from The Register seeking comment on Beatrici's claims or asking whether it stood by its characterization of the incident, despite requests sent to both the project and Rosenkränzer on Friday.

One side calls it sabotage. The other calls it making a point. Either way, someone still had to restore the repos. ®