[Popcon-developers] Re: popularity-contest: Should use generic email address
This need to be coordinated with the debian system administrators,
debian-admin@debian.org. We have discussed this a bit already. Here
is the comments so far, in the order I recieved them.
[Petter Reinholdtsen 2003-09-05]
> On a related note, to make the popularity-contest system more
> independent of the current maintain, I believe the package should be
> changed to send the information to a generic address, instead of the
> current apenwarr-survey@debian.org. Would it be possible to get a
> mail forwarding address that can be pointed to the current
> maintainer, ie closing bug #206830? I suggest
> popularity-contest@debian.org or popcon@debian.org, but any good
> generic name would do.
[Avery Pennarun 2003-09-05]
> That makes sense. I prefer popularity-contest@debian.org, since that's
> obviously not a username. popcon might be "Mr. Poppa Con"... or worse :)
[Martin Schulze 2003-09-05]
> whatabout input@popcon.alioth.debian.org?
>
> I guess that you can assign mail addresses in alioth, but wiggy
> probably knows details.
[Avery Pennarun 2003-09-05]
> I wouldn't recommend that - it sounds like encoding an admin detail
> into a long-term config entry on a lot of boxes. (Yeah, yeah, I
> know, I'm a hypocrite: the whole point is to get of the 'apenwarr'
> in the email address. But if we're going to fix it, we should fix
> it properly.)
[Martin Schulze 2003-09-05]
> Parse error
[Avery Pennarun 2003-09-05]
> The old submission email address was
>
> apenwarr-survey@debian.org
> and the proposed new one is
> input@popcon.alioth.debian.org
>
> Both include an administrative detail in the name ("apenwarr", "alioth").
> This is bad because if those administrative details change, every user of
> popcon will have to install an updated package, reconfigure the package, or
> whatever. It's the same reason we tell people to go to "www.debian.org"
> instead of "gluck.debian.org".
>
> The whole point of changing the address at all (which is painful enough) is
> to get the administrative detail - apenwarr - out of the email address.
> Replacing it with another one - alioth - is no better. In fact, since my
> projected lifetime is probably much longer than alioth's, it's a step
> backwards.
>
> I propose a real email alias (popularity-contest@debian.org,
> input@popcon.debian.org) so that it can be easily changed in the future.
[James Troup 2003-09-05, commenting the second section of averys email]
> That's not the same thing. alioth is actually the service name; the
> machine name is quantz.
[Avery Pennarun 2003-09-05]
> www.dictionary.com says:
>
> alioth: A star in the tail of the Great Bear, the one next the bowl
> in the Dipper.
>
> A service, to me, is more like "mail", "cvs", "www", "ftp", etc.
[Wichert Akkerman 2003-09-06]
> alioth is the gforge service. But hey, if you want something to
> totally fit your wishes why not register a debian.net entry for it?
A while later, I was contacted by Martin Michlmayr in Debian QA,
regarding the same issue.
[Martin Michlmayr 2003-08-24, I got it 2003-10-13]
> [...] The popularity-contest e-mail should also be changed from [Averys]
> personal address to something more generic. [...]
[Petter Reinholdtsen 2003-10-13]
> Making a more generic mail address is already a wishlist bug,
> #206830. But, when we discussed this with the sysadmins, they did
> not like any of the ideas we had at that time. It is a while since
> I had time to look into this, but I expect to be able to return to
> the task in the not too distant future.
[Martin Michlmayr 2003-10-14 regarding the email address]
> OK, I'll try to find out what's going on.
[Martin Michlmayr 2003-10-15]
> Ok, I talked to James. He said that you should mail debian-admin
> explaining what you need exactly. Once you've done that, I will
> talk to him again to get it done.
>
> I think the best thing would just be a popcon.debian.org domain,
> then a .debian.org machine could handle mail and web, etc. Similar
> to what qa.d.o does (see klecker:/org/qa.debian.org/).
So we have a few suggestions, and need to send a new email to
debian-admin explaining in more detail what we want. I'll try to find
time to write that proposal later, but just wanted to document the
current status in BTS. This should make it possible for others to do
the work if I fail to find time soon enough. :)
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