Re: Supporting armel/armhf in wheezy-lts

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Fri, 22 Apr 2016, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> I am not speaking on behalf of DSA here.

Thanks for making this clear. I also want to explain why I included DSA
in the discussion: I wanted to make sure that the fact that we run wheezy
armel/armhf buildd for two more years do not go against some DSA plans to
decommission some machines running those buildd and that you had no other
problems to keep those machine running during the LTS timeframe.

Concerning the other concerns that you brought up, they do not seem
specific to the support of the armel/armhf architectures. They rather
question the LTS project as a whole and the usage of money within Debian.
But the LTS project has been running smoothly for two years now and
thus there's nothing new to discover here.

But your questions are legitimate and we should discuss them. I have
submitted a BoF for DebConf16 to discuss how to use money to fund "Debian
projects" (and not only sprints) and I invite you to join this discussion
if you can attend.

That said the DMUP is not a foundation document defining our values, it's
a set of rules that DSA edicted long ago to:
- avoid problems for the sponsors that are hosting our servers
  (that were quite often public institutions like universities)
- give some ground to DSA to block accounts for obvious misuses of the
  Debian resources (hosting warez, hosting of webpages unrelated to Debian,
  running daemons unrelated to Debian, for example to crack passwords
  or cryptography challenges, etc.)

So while the text contains wording again "commercial purpose", it should
not include work that benefits to Debian. Otherwise we are all in troubles.
Many people are paid to work on Debian (even if we do not always know it)
and we don't want to refuse their work.

I tried to discuss with James Troup who wrote the text with other members
a long time ago and while he did not remember the exact reasons why they
came up with this, he clearly mentionned the fact that this was inspired
by rules used in universities and that it made sense to align to those
since we were often hosted in such places.

But honestly, the fact that some people are paid to work on Debian LTS
and that they upload packages that end up on the servers of universities
sponsoring us is not a real problem.

That's why I have been advocating for a change of the DMUP. It has been
used far too often to annoy persons who are being paid (or who are
accepting donations) to work on Debian instead of causing real troubles
that could annoy sponsors or create problems to the DSA team.

I have also been looking at ways to bring the "LTS funding" closer to Debian
and to find a way to join all this in the Debian Partner program but we
don't have many volunteers interested in this work. We discussed it a bit
last year during Debconf with Luca Filippozi, Martin Krafft and Neil
McGovern, but this never went further. And I obviously don't want to be
leading this project due to the clear conflict of interest that I would
have...

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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