Re: Unofficial repositories on 'debian' domains
2012/3/5 Stefano Zacchiroli <leader@debian.org>:
> 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.
I'd like to put my 2 cents: being a long time Debian user, it's still
rather hard for me to separate debian.net and debian.org. Both domains
are used widely, e.g. unofficial mentors.debian.net is widely used in
d-m list, which is obviously official. These domains look visually
identical, one can't easily tell one from another in apt sources.list.
I suppose there should be used some completely unrelated domain name
(as does Ubuntu with its launchpad.net), or unofficial repositories
should be placed on the address, looking like
"*.unofficial.debian.net" or "unofficial.debian.net/*". Otherwise it
would always lead people to misunderstanding.
Best wishes and have a nice day,
Vsevolod Velichko
> 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.
>
> Agreed.
>
> 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.
>
>> But for new users and potential users, this distinction probably isn't
>> obvious. There is a reason that Debian has pursued trademark
>> enforcement actions against various debian.xy domains.
>
> Agreed, and I've been thinking about debian-multimedia.org since quite a
> while. According to our trademark policy (present and draft), the
> website is in violation of Debian trademark. As the website is
> maintained by a Debian Developer, I'm sure we don't need that specific
> aspect to come into some sort of amicable solution.
>
> 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.
>
>> And to avoid singling out debian-multimedia.org, I think this
>> confusion could just as well happen with repositories on
>> foo.debian.net domains.
>
> I think the situations with debian.net is quite different. *.debian.net
> is a namespace offered by Debian to developers that want to setup
> services which are not (yet) integrated in the Debian infrastructure
> and, as such, not yet blessed as official project services. I don't
> think we need to have any stricter procedure that the current one for
> people to setup *.debian.net entries.
>
>
> While we are at it, I also think we should provide an index of
> *.debian.net entries on that splash page.
> http://wiki.debian.org/DebianNetDomains is just too prone to outdateness
> and incompleteness. The index can be automatically generated from LDAP
> and. IIRC a past chat with DSA, DSA is fine with that but is aware of
> privacy concerns that some of the registrant of *.debian.net entries
> might have. Personally, I don't think we should be worried about privacy
> concerns there. 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.
>
>
> Cheers.
> --
> Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
> Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
> Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
> « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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