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Re: I'll be a son of a bitch.



On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 06:44:33PM -0600, Ean Schuessler wrote:
> On Wednesday 13 April 2005 7:24 pm, Dave Hornford wrote:
> > Then shouldn't its status be updated to indicate its real status rather
> > than 'root fs drive died, no response from local admin'
> > The accurate story indicates a need for help & hardware, the posted
> > status something else.

> If someone wants Lully I will put it in a box tommorrow and ship it to
> them. If someone from the Alpha port actually wants to update the status,
> build me an image and ship me a drive then we will happily install it in
> the system and bring it back online.

> We're providing the machine bandwidth and rackspace at our expense and we're 
> happy to do it. We don't have time to shoulder the burden of becoming 
> developers in the Alpha port. Moreover, we don't really have any interest in 
> doing that. If someone wants Lully on-line then get us a bootable volume, or 
> really explicit instructions that a full-time busy shop can follow and 
> reliably get it back on-line.

> I didn't post that status nor are we actively monitoring it. Someone from 
> Alpha needs to get proactive and run the ball if they care about that 
> machine.

The problem there, however, is that there aren't actually any Alpha porters
today.  Alpha is port*ed*, past tense, with very little ongoing work; the
people listed at www.debian.org/intro/organization are not currently
involved (at least one of them is no longer active in the project), and
those of us who take care of the alpha-specific code bits on an ongoing
basis, like the installer, kernel, and bootloader, have no formal status as
porters.  We also have no authority over build daemons.

So it's all well and good to say that "someone from Alpha" needs to get
proactive, but AFAICT, that's an organizational null pointer; and I think
this is in fact part of why our ports have been so hard to corral for sarge,
because "porters" only exist for new ports, and we have no other process for
people to assume responsibility for the overall health of a port.

In any case, the two obvious contenders for inheriting this responsibility
would be debian-admin and debian-alpha; the former being the ones that
listed lully's status as "no response from local admin", and the latter
having received no communication from anyone about this issue.  In fact, it
seems I had more information about lully's status than DSA did, and only
because I had talked with Adam Heath about it on IRC.  If there's work that
needs doing, I'm happy to help, but it's certainly not as if this was
something the "alpha folks" dropped the ball on -- until now, there was
never any reason to think it was our ball...

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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