Re: Debian services and Debian infrastructure
On Wed, 22 Jan 2014, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> > 2) the alternative is that they give up on the idea, or host it
> > themselves, which makes it harder to work collaboratively on the
> > service, and results in services that have a single maintainer (or
> > none, in the end).
>
> How does having a random VM running in a cloud somewhere make that
> service easier to integrate into the wider debian.org setup?
It means those people who want to experiment get to ask a VM at some
predefined places where various parties can monitor who is asking
and what their projects are.
> think it does; what does is the first point: talk to us so we can figure
> out what works for both sides. Especially given you want to give root
> to developers on those VMs, there's absolutely nothing that points in a
> direction of those VMs being more integrateable than a service developed
> on a developer's own laptop (in a VM or in their regular environment).
Indeed, but it gives others (including DSA) an opportunity to chime in
sooner.
> > Another requirement is that the developers should have root access on
> > the virtual machine, so that it's easy to try various options without
> > DSA intervention (remember: this is about developement/beta testing,
> > not about running the service in a super-stable, production mode).
>
> Who's then to ensure that machine is secured and kept up to date with
> security patches and doesn't become a source of spam? Sorry to say, but
> most developers are not good sysadmins and they do not have the tools
> and infrastructure set up to do systems maintenance well. For this to
> be an option at all, we'd want to sandbox the machines heavily enough
> that they will be less attractive machines to develop on than a
> developer's own laptop.
What kind of restrictions do you expect to have to set up? I can imagine
some restrictions on outgoing mails (like Amazon VM do by default)
but what else could impeded the abilitiy to develop a new service?
> It's sgran who's been thinking about how to do this, but afaik he's seen
> close to zero interest from developers for it, so it's not happened
> yet. I don't think we need anything from the DPL as such, but if people
> are actually interested in something like this happening, saying so
> would be a good start.
I would be interested by it. I would have used it for pts.debian.net
(instead of the Amazon VM we have now).
And later, I would like us to be able to use a Debian cloud to automatize the
rebuild of reverse dependencies with a set of updated packages.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Discover the Debian Administrator's Handbook:
→ http://debian-handbook.info/get/
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