Last week, the attached mail was sent privately to many people. I'm told it was sent to all Debian developers and everyone who isn't a Debian developer but who has an Alioth account. As much as I appreciate everyone being kept in the loop regarding resource availability, I daresay this was not the optimal way of doing it. I'd like to make the following observations: * Every Debian Developer is expected to read the debian-devel-announce mailing list[1]; * Any non-Debian Developer who uses Alioth is probably well-advised to read debian-devel-announce themselves (and many may already do so); * Alioth has a website of its own; * There was no indication of who sent this mail. and the following recommendations: * Please use debian-devel-announce for reporting major service updates/outages like this. If it's important enough to privately mail hundreds of developers a boilerplate message about, it's important enough for debian-devel-announce, in my view; * Conceivably, the set of registered Alioth site users who are *not* also Debian Developers can be determined, and they could have been mailed privately; * The service transition could have been posted as a news item on alioth.debian.org itself; * No administrative mail of this nature should conceal the identity of the sender. On top of all the other reasons it's bad, it provides us with no means of authenticating the announcement. Consider the possibilities if the mail sent had been illegitimate and requested people's passwords, private SSH or GPG keys, and so forth. While I'd like to believe that no one would fall for this, we've all read horror stories of gullibility. I recommend identifying yourself when making an administrative announcement of this nature, and I further recommend GPG-signing such messages. None of the above should be interpreted as disappointment in the improvement of Alioth's hosting situation. The work being done rocks -- I'm just hopeful that our means of announcing that work will rock a little more in the future, too. :) -- G. Branden Robinson | Reality is what refuses to go away Debian GNU/Linux | when I stop believing in it. branden@debian.org | -- Philip K. Dick http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
--- Begin Message ---
- To: "Branden Robinson" <branden@debian.org>
- Subject: [Alioth] Moving Alioth to another server
- From: Mailer <noreply@alioth.debian.org>
- Date: Fri, 13 May 2005 17:53:09 -0500
- Message-id: <E1DWj1p-0003wU-00@master.debian.org>
Keeping up with recent tradition it's about time that Alioth moves to another server again. Now that amd64 has moved to its own server we have enough diskspace to merge all of Alioth on costa. This has the benefit of having both webspace and all sourcecode repositories on the same machine and not having to wait a day for password changes. The move will happen next monday (May 16) during daytime CET. During the move some services will not be available, or only read-only. Homedirectories will not be copied over. Users can copy files over manually if necessary.
--- End Message ---
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