Re: Debian services and Debian infrastructure
On Mon, January 6, 2014 11:38, Stephen Gran wrote:
> I don't think jumping straight to a solution that puts all of the
> responsibility for every idea for a service in Debian on DSA shoulders is
> either the only way to go or even a good way to go. There are plenty
> of bad ideas that should be allowed to wither on the vine, and there
> are always going to be services that have been designed in such a way as
> to be difficult to integrate into DSA-managed infrastructure. We are,
> after all, a reasonably small team of volunteers. Pretending that we
> can support an infinite number of services or an infinite variety of
> designs is just going to end in disappointment for someone.
I think this is a good observation. The whole problem does not seem to
differ at all from with the tradeoffs that the sysadmin team in a large
organisation wherein I work, have to make regularly. New services come to
us in a variety of forms: someone just requests functionality and all
other decisions are left to us; someone wants us to host a product or is
developing a product and consults us early on (those people are the
best!); more often someone has already bought or developed some product
and it 'just' needs to be hosted.
It's always a case by case judgement: how essential is this service? Will
this fit in our infrastructure? If not, can we feasibly have it changed so
it will? And if not, sometimes it's decided that we will need to host it
nonetheless, in other cases we advise to host it somewhere else. The
latter is surely an option and it doesn't necessarily mean we completely
lose control over it at all. The simple fact that we retain control over
DNS is a blunt but effective last resort to anything gone bad.
Just like DSA, it's not our job to exclusively host everything that the
organisation requires nor is it required that everything that we do end up
hosting conforms to our ideal of the perfect service.
Cheers,
Thijs
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