Re: Bits (Nybbles?) from the Vancouver release team meeting
On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 01:49:24PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 11:11:55AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 02:12:48AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> > > Where human delay did come into play was in getting the xfree86 mess
> > > cleaned; in theory it should have taken one or two days, but in
> > > practice it took much longer.
> >
> > Why not fully eliminate the human factor ? Ubuntu does automated build from
> > source only uploads, the package sources are built and signed by a developer,
> > autobuilt on all arches, and i don't believe they are individually signed
> > after that.
>
> Ubuntu is in the happy situation of having a system in a DMZ - i.e. not
> network-accessible in general without having to get through other
> barriers first - with very few login accounts and full-time maintenance
> on which to do auto-signing, and similar systems to act as buildds.
> Debian isn't remotely in that position. Auto-signing requires a great
> deal of care and thought before blindly enabling it, and certainly it
> must not happen on a generally network-accessible machine and it
> probably shouldn't happen while the buildds remain generally
> network-accessible.
Ok, i understand that, but still the main point is that debian currently
doesn't accept source-only uploads, as ubuntu has done a policy of doing.
I believe that it should be possible for the tier 1 arches to get a similar
setup than what ubuntu does, and there should be nothing stopping us from
setting up something accessible for the tier2 buildd networks. We just need to
come up with a policy for this, and not just say no to start with.
As we are 'dropping' tier 2 arches anyway, we are handing over the
responsability to whoever will take over these ports maintenance anyway.
> We were in a bad enough situation during the server compromise when it
> was discovered that some developers had inadvertently left their private
> GPG keys on network-accessible machines with lots of login accounts.
> Surely you acknowledge that as a mistake by those developers, and not
> something we should be encouraging by making it an essential part of our
> infrastructure?
Yes, but that is no reason to say that we can't do it, just that we have to be
carefull about it. I personally will gladly get donation for any number of
needed powerpc boxes needed for setting up such a fully automated buildd
infrastructure, like ubuntu has. This would need 3 machines with lot of disk
and memory space, i guess, given the N+1 and N <= 2 numbers.
But then, there remains the fact that such an infrastructure was strongly
vetoed by the ftp-master last time it was brought upon a couple years ago i
think it was.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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