Having just read the whole thread;

xscreensaver developer jwz added an allcaps/all bold notification to xscreensaver that says that the current xscreensaver version is really old. This notification could not be user canceled / okayed through. The author did this because he apparently received several emails about xscreensaver versions that were years out of date.

Debian stable’s policy is to make no updates unless they are security or bug related. This directly conflicted with jwz’s policy of only supporting the latest version of xscreensaver.

The Debian maintainers chose to remove the unskippable warning as the other options were harder to maintain / worse to use. This was specifically permissable in the xscreensaver license, but against the authors stated wishes to have xscreensaver removed entire if the warning could not be kept or the software could not be updated.

Of note, jwz escalated to yelling at the first reporter about this in his first email and swearing at another reporter in his second. The Debian stable team offered suggestions which would direct Debian users to the Debian development team for bug reports about the old versions of xscreensaver, but jwz’s hostile approach made that not happen at all.

If I install debian stable it’s because I want it to work, and to not be bothered about anything that doesn’t need to happen. That’s whole point of having Debian stable around. One of the points made in the discussion, which I strongly agree with, is that Linux software is managed in a repository, not individually. A windows program telling me out of date is obnoxious, but expected. A Linux program telling me it is out of date is a obnoxious and unexpected. (Fucking discord…)

The xscreensaver author shot himself in the foot with this one; presumably he wanted to avoid being harrassed over old versions of xscreensaver. What he ended up doing was telling everyone with an old version of xscreensaver that they need to update and then guaranteed they would harass thim about it by not giving the users an option to ignore and walk away from the message.