Re: Question to all candidates: what to do with the Debian money, shall we invest in hardware and cloud?
Hi Thomas,
Am Wed, Mar 27, 2024 at 12:24:30AM +0100 schrieb Thomas Goirand:
> As you know, there's a large amount of money sleeping in SPI account for
> Debian. Do you have ideas on how to spend it?
While I admit that I'm not well informed about the status of the acount
currently I'm perfectly open to interesting suggestsions. In general I
think donators want to see their money spent for the progress of Debian
and not for filling up some bank account.
> Would you be ok spending 100k USD on buying hardware for a new Debian cloud,
> for example? I've always volunteered to operate it for Debian, but it never
> went through, because I haven't spent time to find where to host it and so
> on, but highvoltage liked the idea. Do you like this idea? Do you think it'd
> be useful for Debian?
While I personally have no use case for this I'm perfectly open for
spending money on this and love to discuss this either on debian-project
or debian-private (if private discussion seems to be appropriate).
However, I see an important requirement to consider this money well
spent: We need a team who cares for the maintenance of this cloud. I do
not think that we can simply add to the workload of DSA. And I want it
to be a real team and not a 1-person team.
> Also, I found very annoying that we don't have enough buildd, or that the
> reproducible build project doesn't have as much hardware as they would like.
> Would it be ok to spend another 100k USD for this kind of things?
I'd happily spent money on infrastructure we really need which includes
buildd and reproducible builds. I'm also fine with stregthening Debci
and Salsa CI if needed. But also here the question is: Just permitting
the usage of money is one thing. We also need people to do the actual
grunt work of buying, installing and maintaining the hardware. If this
is granted I'm perfectly fine with it.
> For some packages of mine, the current shared runners are too slow to even
> run time-based tests of openvswitch for example... What about the Salsa CI?
As I mentioned above I'm happy to make Salsa CI more performant.
> Couldn't we pay some cloud providers to have faster shared runners? It
> wouldn't be hard to hook them.
Paying some cloud providers to host shared runners for us might be one
answer to my requirement that there are actual people who care and not
only money thrown at some hardware. It needs to be well thought /
discussed what services can be delegated to some cloud providers and
what needs to be Debian hosted. For Salsa CI I do not see any
constraints since its just building publicly accessible code.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
https://fam-tille.de
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