xz-utils was 2 years ago now. It's surprising to me that people are still willing to apply any presumption of good faith and authenticity to interactions like this, especially after:
- "begging and praying" to include an unknown project in the distro
- offering what for all the world looks like an extremely clumsy bribe
- pushing a project full of contradictory and blatantly untrue claims
We don't have to - and in fact absolutely should not - evaluate projects based purely on "technical merit"! The people behind the project matter at least as much as "code quality."
And we absolutely should not be presuming good faith on the part of random people on the internet who have gotten ahold of our email addresses! Ask to see some credentials before turning your wallet over to the Wallet Inspector!
1. I don't think that that attempt for open bribery can mean anything except social cluelessness. Their intentions doesn't matter, because their actions as they are can achieve only a rejection of his package. We can try to find a hypothesis that would assume that the effect of their words is exactly what they wanted it to be, but I think it would be too much into the opposite territory, the territory of paranoia, "ahh all people are trying to kill me", something like that.
2. I think you are confusing a presumption of good faith with a presumption of a basic courtesy. I can be very suspicious, but (if I were a debian maintainer) I want those maillists to be functional. And it means basic courtesy and a presumption of good faith. There is no need to accuse the other side of what you suspect them to explain your suspicions to them and everyone watching.
And if my words seem to you like I have no suspicions or ignore them, well... I'll treat it as an evidence of how good I am.
If you read my message, it doesn't presume bad faith, but it doesn't presume good either. It focuses on observable behavior, proposes a hypothesis about personal traits, but it touches their motivation only in passing. "they realized they can write a code" can be seen as a description of a motivation, but for me it is not, because it doesn't explain their particular way to apply their new abilities to write code. Why browser, why to package it for debian? Why they are so insistent on it?