Re: removing debian-consultants list
On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 01:02:13PM +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
> It seems that Brian May has done more woody back-ports than anyone else.
>
> deb http://www.microcomaustralia.com.au/debian/ stable selinux main
>
> The above apt line gets Brian's packages (you can skip the "selinux" part if
> you don't want the SE patched versions of login etc). Brian's site can
> sustain a reasonable amount of use (although it's not particularly fast), if
> that becomes an issue there is an option of a European mirror for better
> bandwidth (Brian - is Tom mirroring the rest of your archive or just the SE
> stuff?).
I believe he is mirroring everything.
> I think it would be good if we organized a consistant site for such back-ports
> with designated people for different packages. Brian, how difficult would it
> be to set this up?
All the infrastructure is in place to allow anyone to upload that is
already in Debian.
The only think we would need is a place people can upload packages...
Care also needs to be taken with the upload queues to ensure a person
doesn't upload with an illegal filename and cause damage, I am not sure
what measures Debian uses here.
I would also need the public key of the maintainer.
> Also one thing that can be considered is paying people to back-port the
> packages. If you have a need for Postgresql to be back-ported and to have it
> kept up to date with bug fixes etc then it might be easiest to just pay
> someone like Brian $100 per month to do the work and email you whenever
> there's a new package ready to be installed. $100 per month is not much
> money if your business depends on Postgres, but over the year it's enough pay
> to make it worth-while for someone to fo the work properly.
Backporting the majority of packages is easy, I have a script that will
automatically download, add a changelog entry, compile, and upload.
Checking what packages need recompiling and it what order is not easy.
Testing that packages before I move them from unstable to stable
is downright time consuming (even though the testing is often very
primitive, and just checks the package installs OK).
> Another thing that springs to mind is backups. It seems that all Linux backup
> software is grossly inadequate, apart from the commercial software which is
> ridiculously expensive, slightly inadequate, and has security issues. If
> someone has the funding then we could develop some better backup software for
> Linux to address some of these issues. Brian has suggested extending DAR for
> network functionality.
I think I read someting somewhere about and ITP for a program that
allowed backups via rsync. I never got a chance to look at it yet
though, and don't have time to lookup the reference at this precise point
in time.
--
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>
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