Re: Review of personal information sources in Debian
Hi.
My comments below.
Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org> writes:
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 10:12:33AM +0100, Martín Ferrari wrote:
>
>
> I'd like to add a 'preferences' page where one could do some identity
> management. I want to avoid having nm.d.o be the primary data source for
> anything except the status of people in Debian, and I'd rather hook into
> other existing databases whenever possible.
>
> In terms of managing one's visible full name, for example, this means
> that I was planning to just allow people to choose which of the various
> full names they have in Debian (for example, the primary UID on their
> GPG key) should be the default on the site.
>
> The multiple email situation can be addressed by interfacing with the
> MIA database, which already tracks this kind of information, of course
> after a little discussion on what bits of it can be publicly exposed and
> what shouldn't.
>
> Then, once the site shows things right, a REST API can take care of
> allowing the information to be reused by other bits of Debian.
>
>
>> > Code is at http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=nm/nm2.git;a=summary
>> > What did you have in mind?
>> Something very similar to this, but I thought I would have to rely on
>> alioth. Having this information in the main LDAP tree is much better.
>
> Sure, with the limitation that we currently do require legal names on
> LDAP, and that people may prefer to use something else for their online,
> google-searchable persona. Could there be a 'public name' field in LDAP?
> I haven't tried figuring that out yet.
>
> Also, at the moment LDAP is only for people with an account on Debian
> machine: DDs and guest accounts. Even most DMs don't have an LDAP entry,
> for example.
>
> I think we need some free-registration identity provider, and we can use
> Alioth, or even identi.ca via oauth. We've started discussing details
> with DSA and Alioth admins, but haven't found a workable solution yet.
>
>
>> What is not completely clear to me is how people get in there in the
>> first place. I see the LDAP directory now has ou=users, but I didn't
>> find instructions in the NM site. The other thing is that I don't see
>
> Here are the details: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2010/09/msg00026.html
>
>
>> anything that would encourage people to create an account unless they
>> want to start the NM process. I don't know if this is intended to be
>> that way or not, but what I envision is a database where all
>> contributors could be found, specially contributors that are hidden in
>> the deep dark corners of the project.
>
> Definitely. That's what I meant when I mentioned using Alioth, or even
> identi.ca, as an extra identity provider: anyone can register there.
>
Have you heard about WebID [0] (a.k.a FOAF + SSL).
I think we could make use of WebID to provide a document describing the
Debian contributors profiles, which could be generated by the nm.d.o
(under the control of the member's preferences) and that could be
consumed by any other service that wants to make use of it (no need for
SOAP, just HTTP GET + RDF parsing), and that could also at the same time
include the SSL cert parts that would allow to use it for SSO
(interesting links between such use of SSL and of GPG in Debian, ahead,
too...).
Besides this, these WebIDs could be the reference URIs for identifying
developers on the Linked Data Cloud, allowing to interface with other
descriptions of Debian resources on the Semantic Web.
For example, if you check the apache2 source package representation (in
Turtle) at [1], that I hope can be generated by the PTS soon (more
details in [2]), we could have "named resources" (i.e. ones with WebIDs)
so that the packagers aren't any longer "blank nodes" there.
This would lead to the PTS generating descriptions in the form of :
<http://packages.qa.debian.org/fusionforge>
a admssw:SoftwareProject ;
doap:name "fusionforge" ;
doap:description "Debian fusionforge source packaging" ;
schema:contributor <http://nm.d.o/member/obergix> ...
where <http://nm.d.o/member/obergix> would be my WebID (a RDF document
generated from my Debian profile preferences), which could even include
a rdfs:sameAs link to my existing WebID
<http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/foaf.rdf#me>, if I wished to
advertize my Debian contributions and the rest of my work.
Also, note that I've been working on implementing such foaf profiles
generation for FusionForge (soon available for alioth) and a WebID
authentication plugin for FusionForge too.
I'm willing to contribute some code to demonstrate that in more details,
once I'm done with pushing my additions to the PTS.
I think we have here a great potential for interoperability, because of
the use of RDF, that we should consider instead of reinventing allover
again forms of RFC822 or YAML in lots of different tools... but I think
I've already ranted on that ;)
Best regards,
[0] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebID
[1] http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/2012/08/24/generating-rdf-description-of-debian-package-sources-with-adms-sw/
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2012/08/msg00099.html
--
Olivier BERGER
http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8
Ingenieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut Mines-Telecom, Telecom SudParis, Evry (France)
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