Re: What have we learned? (WAS -RE: Idea: Reponse to the responses( was RE: Interesting idea....(at least I think so) ))
On Fri, 26 Apr 2002, Adam C Powell IV wrote:
> But a lot of activities don't have a single point of contact. Is that a
> problem? Sometimes. It might be nice to have single contacts for, say,
> each port, but I don't think there is one. "Write to the list" has been
> sufficient.
There already are single (or at least very few) points of contact for
every port except i386 (which is usually handled collectively by all of
the maintainers that use that platform primarily). In most cases, though,
an official "port maintainer" reply isn't needed for most issues and a
"write to the list" is very appropriate. In other cases, such as
release-critical issues on a platform, port maintainers are frequently
contacted directly. I agree about the rest of your statement, though, in
that it can be a problem sometimes to not be able to clearly identify an
"official" party for handling specific issues, especially for those
outside of Debian or amongst the newer DDs.
We can take the rest of this to the appropriate forum, though, as I doubt
that we need to clutter the (primarily RedHat) axp-list with that traffic
:-)
> I'm going to put my neck out here and guess that the lack of any
> response whatsoever to Branden's email to debian-alpha in the last three
> days is probably a decent indication that the Debian project doesn't
> absolutely need such a machine right now.
Well, consider your neck cut :-P There is a real need for the machine,
but trying to find which need is greatest has become an issue that I must
evaluate. We now have some working alphas available, but a more modern
system may be good for replacing a not-as-capable machine (autobuilders,
for example, should be as fast and modern as possible, IMO). Brandon's
desire for an Alpha for X work is also an important goal (and ranks above
my desire to replace the aging SX that I've used to build many of the past
releases). I need to take another look at where each of our existing
systems stand as far as recommending the best "home" for a donated Alpha,
but I would definitely say that we could put a new machine to work almost
immediately.
> There are three basic demands
> for machines of a given architecture:
>
> * Autobuilding. As a maintainer, I can safely say that alpha
> binaries for my packages are autobuilt very promptly after source
> upload, so there's no big need there.
True, the autobuilder is quite capable. However, I'm not sure if it's
also providing developer access. If it is, and it's not as fast as the
donated equipment, then it may be a good candidate to replace the slower
machine. Without looking at what we have closely, though, I cannot say
yet whether this is the case.
> * Rbuild for stable security updates, which is one of the
> requirements for an architecture to release with woody. Again, I
> think we're okay here.
Yes, we are (finally).
> * Miscellaneous machines for maintainers who need to debug/test
> their packages on a given architecture. Haven't heard this need
> expressed for alpha either (though ARM often gets this complaint).
Three archs languished without developer access for quite awhile: powerpc,
arm, and alpha. In alpha's case, we had two machines, but both were down
for an extended length of time due to serious hardware problems. I
believe those issues to be resolved, but am not sure about the current
status of them (I wanted to verify that the systems were healthy myself,
but haven't had the opportunity yet). ARM and powerpc still seem to
suffer from a lack of developer-accessible machines, however.
> Alternatively, "it's only been three days," and with a volunteer project
> that is not a very long time, even if there is a port coordinator it
> could take longer than that to reply. Also, you send your original post
> (Subject "Donation", 23 Apr 2002 03:30:23 -0000) as a reply to "Alpha
> newbie install woes", making it difficult for people to read it, since
> it threads under that message and is invisible in many mail clients,
> this is why creating a brand new message is encouraged vs. replying to
> an existing one on a list like this. But that's a technicality.
I caught the message, but haven't had the time to reply before now,
unfortunately. I think, at least in my case, the timing of the message
couldn't have been worse, since I have the least free time at this
particular moment than I've had in years. I cannot speak for
debian-admin, so I don't know what kind of time constraints they have or
how much longer it might have been before they replied.
> Of course, it doesn't change some of your main points. I don't think a
> central coordinator for the port would have helped things, but it might
> be worth considering; the downside is that a single point of contact is
> also a single point of failure.
I agree with this point. Since I technically am the port maintainer and
failed in this case, I became the single point of failure. I wish that I
had more people to defer to during times like these, but unfortunately,
that isn't the case.
> am hoping that package pools and active development of the next
> generation install system will make Debian 3.1 come out a whole lot
> closer to 3.0 than 3.0 was to 2.2, and will do my best to make my
> packages ready for that next release.
I share this hope. I know that there is already talk about how to
drastically shorten our release cycles. Hopefully, we can take some of
the ideas proposed so far and build on that.
> As long as there are user-developers, there will be support. This was
> the gist of Peter's original post, and the piece on alphanews: if
> everyone from axp-list comes over to debian-alpha, then we'll not only
> have support, but world-class support, e.g. testers for the APB install
> method on the Nautilus subarch (currently disabled in woody
> boot-floppies; my Nautilus has failed or I'd test and debug myself), and
> a working PGI graphical installer with hardware auto-detection (also
> described in the "for details:" link above).
I also have lost access to the nautilus systems that I had use of
before. It's unfortunate to have to disable nautilus from boot-floppies,
but I think it was necessary until we can adequately test it again (nobody
wants an installer that doesn't work).
> And you'd more quickly find a deserving taker for your donation, who
> would run Debian on it and join the community of user-developers
> committed to making this the best distro anywhere (nine hundred
> maintainers and growing...).
This is also true. Believe it or not, I've heard from quite a few
developers in the past year or so that expressed interest in gaining
access to an alpha for active development work (not just testing existing
code). There are interested people out there, but in this case, I'm
absolutely positive that we have a need that this machine would easily
fill...now to just figure out which need is greater :-)
> Oh, I see Chris has just replied to your message, and expressed more
> authoritatively an interest in your machine donation.
:-) It took longer than normal (my normal email turnaround is one hour),
but I'm finally here :-P
C
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