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where news about Alioth should go

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 --- 
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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