Re: Unofficial repositories on 'debian' domains
On Mon, March 5, 2012 08:40, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 04, 2012 at 10:59:39PM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
>> Looking at the front page of http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ today,
>> I don't see a clear statement that it is unofficial.
> I also find disturbing that the website seeks for donations without
> making clear that donated money do not go to the Debian Project. That is
> not necessarily done out of malice, of course, but it seems to live in
> the same uncertainty about the "unofficiality" of the website that you
> mention.
I do think that for the specific case there's more than enough hints for
people to assume the "unofficiality"; and of course, debian-multimedia is
well-known in the user community to be an unofficial resource. However,
being explicit about this fact never hurts. I would be in favour to allow
trademark use if an explicit notice was placed on the web page.
> But before getting there, the question is whether the existence of the
> website (and its popularity) poses problem to Debian reputation and/or
> to the activity of official Debian multimedia packaging. I think this is
> a question for the Debian Multimedia Maintainers (as in
> <pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>) to answer. If they
> see a problem with debian-multimedia.org, we should get in touch with
> the website maintainers and solve the issue.
Of course, one of the reasons debian-multimedia exists is precisely
because it's unofficial: it can package things that Debian out of policy
doesn't want to package. This is not something that can necessarily be
solved on a packaging level.
> What we need, though, is probably to make it more clear to our users
> what is the difference among *.debian.net and *.debian.org services. It
> is something that developers know by folklore, but that I seriously
> doubt most of our users know. For me, the most appropriate way to do is
> to put a splash page at www.debian.net explaining that. If DSA agrees
> with that approach, I'm sure we can easily come up with a suitable
> splash text.
That may help a bit, but I don't think many people will regularly consult
the 'www.debian.net' if they ended up on 'something.debian.net' via Google
or a link somewhere. A simple policy could be: "If you provide a service
targeting end users, use an appropriate way inside the used protocol, if
such a way exists, to indicate that this is not an official project
service.". For HTTP this could simply be a sentence in the served HTML,
FTP can use a message, etc.
> The debian.net is a Debian project resource and we
> should be ready to advertise all its entries, otherwise people should
> not register them in the first place.
Indeed. Perhaps we do want to give DD's who took other assumptions on
appropriate use some grace period to relinquish their registrations before
they are published, though.
Thijs
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