OpenMandriva claims disgruntled admin trashed repos after community bust-up
OpenMandriva claims disgruntled admin trashed repos after community bust-up
Publish Date: 2026-07-09 13:15:00
Source Domain: www.theregister.com
SOFTWARE
Linux distro accuses former contributor of deleting years of work and pushing a package that could have broken installs
OpenMandriva has accused a former contributor of using his trusted admin access to trash repositories and push a package that could have broken desktop installations after a community dispute spilled over into the project’s infrastructure.
The Linux distribution disclosed the incident in a forum post this week, describing what it called an attempted act of “distribution sabotage” allegedly involving Davide Beatrici, a developer known for his work on the Mumble instant messaging app.
According to OpenMandriva, Beatrici joined the project some time ago and later offered to migrate its repository infrastructure from GitHub to his privately operated OneDev instance, mirroring several dozen repositories in the process.
While some maintainers were uneasy about concentrating so much of the project’s infrastructure in one person’s hands, the proposal went ahead because, as the project put it, “he was such a well-known figure that we didn’t expect anything bad.”
OpenMandriva says trouble started after two other contributors joined alongside Beatrici. One allegedly engaged in repeated abusive behavior toward users and project members, much of it in private messages. The project says several contributors left before the maintainers finally stepped in, kicking the individual out of the OpenMandriva-Cooker Matrix chat. He wasn’t banned from the project, but OpenMandriva says the decision “triggered a cascade of events.”
Beatrici and another contributor then resigned. When OpenMandriva later decided there was little point continuing to mirror repositories to Beatrici’s private infrastructure, it says it began severing those connections.
According to the project, that didn’t go down well. “This infuriated Davide so much that, abusing of the administrative privileges he still had,…
