Re: Debian services and Debian infrastructure

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Hello everybody,

I do not think that it is possible to solve all the points of misunderstanding
in a long thread of long emails.

Personally, I am totally confused by what I read, and do not understand what is
even the basic stand point of each participant.  May I suggest that you talk
directly face to face or by videoconference ?

For me, the take home message is:

 - Do not develop services that need you to have administrator access, because
   this is hard to transpose on DSA-hosted machines.

 - Sevices on debian.net should be hosted by Debian as much as possible.

After many years as a DD, I became better at using a machine via root
privileges than via collective hosting.  For instance, I completely forgot how
to use CPAN, and I am much more comfortable configuring apache via
/etc/apache2/sites-available than via .htaccess files.  Also, by my activity of
a DD, I am more familiar with Testing-Unstable mixtures than with Stable.  For
example again, I did the apache 2.4 transition, where the Debian Apache team
made a great work, and I would prefer to forget how the 2.2 systems work.

I think that if I enjoyed collective hosting, I would have used it through
numerus commercial providers, and would not have become a DD.  At work, I would
happily install software in my home directory on our CentOS servers, and would
not mumble regularly that we need access to a cloud system instead.

For upstream-metadata.debian.net (still broken, sorry, but I am working on it),
I packaged the system (umegaya) so that others can clone it easily if needed,
and will be happy to take care myself of the hosting if needed (because I
jumped on apache 2.4 too quickly and blends.debian.net is running Wheezy...).
But now I have the impression that self-hosting it is very unwelcome, and that
the bar for setting up a .debian.net service is very high.

I am not asking for an answer now since you need to clarify a lot of points
together.  I understand the need for transparency, but on the other hand,
posting your discussion on -project gives the implicit message that the other
subscribers should read it.  Please take your time and consider using parallel
and more casual discussion channels, to focus the postings on -project to the
points of agreement that you reached, rather than the points of disagreement,
which we all hope are just transient.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles