I was not totally clear on this. The article makes it sound like the behavior is in the debian patches, and not upstream?
I believe upstream is here, and has the same code as quoted:
https://sourceforge.net/p/xsnow/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/xsnow/src/scenery.c#l332
if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48() < 0.3)
tt = MAXTREETYPE;it is in upstream. but the debian package maintainer is also the upstream maintainer.
Sorry if it sounded like it was only in Debian; that was not my intent. I tried to make clear that the Debian package maintainer and upstream maintainer were one and the same, and that the change was upstream first. That was the reason cited by the person who complained, that he didn't file a bug because the maintainer was the one who instituted the changes upstream.