Hello fellows from Debian CD and Debian Cloud teams,
As you may know, Oracle is interested on getting official Debian
images on their cloud platform[1]. I've been working with them on this
matter and now that we have a proper way to build those images using
bootstrap-vz (the code is not yet on upstream, but is available on my
fork[2]), we would like to do what is needed to call them "official".
Emmanuel Kasper remembered[3] us of the guidelines for official
images[4] and I talked with Steve McIntyre in private about this.
Today, I took a few hours to read again the entire thread (and related
off-thread messages) started by Martin Zobel-Helas[5] regarding Debian
images on Azure, which brought the matter to our attention in the last
November. Right now my main concern is: we need a custom kernel
(compressed with gzip instead of xz), otherwise the instance will not
be able to boot on the current version of Oracle Compute Cloud
Service. This is a point that Brian Gupta cited on a pretty detailed
message[6], in a reference to this 2013 thread[7], which states that
in the need of a custom kernel on an official image, it should be
built and maintained by Debian Developers. I'm not yet a DD, so that's
why Ben Hutchings is cc'ed - maybe he can help us on what we can do
about it.
Another important point, brought up by Bastian Blank[8], is that
Debian Machine Usage Policies[9] forbids usage of "Debian Facilities
for private financial gain or for commercial purposes". I haven't
charged Oracle for anything yet, but they are interested in paying
someone to do this in the long-run. At the same time, both Raphael
Hertzog[10] and Brian Gupta[11] remembered that many people are paid
to work on Debian. So I'm a little bit lost regarding what part of
Debian infrastructure can and cannot be used while being paid by third
parties. For instance, if anyone updates a package on behalf of some
company, is buildd usage accounted as "private usage for paid work"?
The same would apply for an image built on Debian CD hardware?
My 2 cents on this. While package is uploaded by a DD, this is a package and nothing else, no matter if request or initial build was from a paid DD, DM or sponsored user. If accepted in Debian, this is a package "like others".
Using Debian servers, cloud credits should not used for different usage than pure Debian like used for regular packages (computing for example)
Olivier
By the end of the discussion, both Debian CD, Debian Cloud and Debian
Trademark reached an agreement[12][13], where both "Debian", "Debian
Cloud" or "Debian Jessie" names could be used by those images (as it
has been used by images made for Amazon EC2), not mentioning
"official". At the same time, the first item of the proposal[14] says
that they will be considered "Official" Debian images. So I'm kinda
confused about the usage of the word "official". Also, was there any
discussions regarding the policy[15], to be draft from this proposal,
that is expected to be finished by the release of Stretch? I haven't
found any threads about this digging though the "debian-cd" and
"debian-cloud" archives.
Regards,
Tiago.
[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/08/msg00017.html
[2]: https://github.com/myhro/bootstrap-vz/tree/oracle
[3]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00018.html
[4]: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/OfficialImages
[5]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00005.html
[6]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00016.html
[7]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2013/04/msg00068.html
[8]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00037.html
[9]: https://www.debian.org/devel/dmup
[10]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00047.html
[11]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00063.html
[12]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00086.html
[13]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00088.html
[14]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00093.html
[15]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00099.html
--
Tiago "Myhro" Ilieve
Blog: https://blog.myhro.info/
GitHub: https://github.com/myhro
LinkedIn: https://br.linkedin.com/in/myhro
Montes Claros - MG, Brasil