Okay, so on the meeting held on 2013-03-15, community member sixwheeledbeast brought up issues with the relatively well known packages speedpatch and batterypatch.

The criticisms against those particular packages were that:

• speedpatch installs itself by modifying syspart in a way that's not uninstalled cleanly (because it didn't use the standard syspart as the reference for what to make it after uninstall), and that it has caused people to have to reflash in the past.
• batterypatch automatically overclocks a device that installs it without any warning to a user
• batterypatch is coded in such a way that it does not properly check for the more recent power-kernel versions, even though it depends on that package
• One or both (I don't recall) of them violates the Debian packaging guidelines (which Maemo packages are supposed to adhere to).

After some searching since the meeting, I am personally uncertain if all of those criticisms are completely up to date - speedpatch's changelog says since version 3.5 that it does a safe uninstall and uses syspart configs provided by Nokia, for instance. So, obviously, a more in-depth look should always be conducted before doing anything to any package.

But the main point is, does the community think either the tech staff volunteers, or the Council, (or the Board, in theory), should act to remove packages that do clearly have the potential for damage from the Extras and perhaps Extras-Testing repositories? (Extras-Devel would be left untouched either way.)

[The Council's position as of two weeks ago was a unanimous yes for removing harmful packages from both Extras and Extras-Testing.]

[Full disclosure: Although this question is from the entire Council, the text in this post was written by me alone without the proof-reading usually done by other Council members.]