On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 12:47:59PM +0100, Arno Töll wrote:
> DSA is the team which makes a DNS CNAME record, or provides a hosting
> facility. In my interpretation they are not making facts by that. Making
> mentors.debian.net a .org makes the project official part of Debian,
> just like any other core team, e.g. ftp-master, security team, release
> team and so on. That's not something which should be decided without
> consensus among Debian Developers and, perhaps, a DPL which delegates
> some people to a "mentors task".
Leaving legal issues aside [1], I surely agree that turning mentors.d.o
into mentors.d.o is a worthwhile goal. In our eternal quest to have
enough contributors to keep up with Debian development, mentoring is a
fundamental tool. Giving even the tiniest impression that it is a 2nd
class citizen among Debian services is not good™.
But to do so there are several constraints. The first one is, of course,
getting into an agreement with DSA, as it is up to them to maintain the
*.debian.org DNS namespace. In this specific case this is related to [1]
and I hope we can find an agreement that make everybody happy, and free
of legal risks for all involved parties.
Regarding delegation, it can be done, but it is not necessarily a
requirement. For many technical services we simply have informal teams
that are in charge of maintaining the service. I don't see why the
"mentors task" can't simply be such a team as, say, the QA team that
currently maintains services like the PTS or DDPO.
(There are some advantages with delegations, such as clarifying
Constitution-wise stuff like why some DDs are in some *nix groups and
some others are not. But that comes with important disadvantages, such
as institutionalizing die hard powers we should live without in most
cases. Also, if we opt for delegations, then only the DPL can change
team composition and that can easily become a barrier for contributing
to service maintenance.)
Cheers.
[1] which are being discussed in a separate sub-thread, to which I'll
come back given that I've sought in the past very similar legal
advice for Debian's "PPA" [2]
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/06/msg00000.html
--
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
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