Work on the consultants page

[Giuseppe Sacco <eppesuig@debian.org>]

Hi all,
yesterday I started checking email addresses and URLs of consultants page.
Many email messages have been sent about problems on the URLs, and many
more will be sent for email checking. Please note that all these
messages have consultants@d.o in CC, so that this action is completely
publicly available.
Once people reply to email sent, I update the consultants page with a
comment such:
# email checked on 2010-11-13

I wonder if we could have a different approach to this kind of action. I
mean: should I really bother all people that receive email sent to
consultants@d.o filling their mailbox too? May we find a better way to
store information about all these entries?

I am thinking at any sort of database (an sqlite database or even a flat
file like /etc/passwd) that store this kind of information. This
database could be used for creating the consultants page, but it should
also include other information about those entries (i.e., date of last
email sent for check, date of last reply from consultants, date of last
URL check, and so on). Using a database many action will be easier: as
an example, if we decide to check email address once a year, we could
just query database for email addresses last checked more the a years
ago and get a list of all email address that require checking.

>From what I understand, the Debian sysadmin currently offer only
repositories (CVS, git, ...), ldap (for DD details), shell access on a
few machines, but no database engines. Is this true at all?

Thanks,
Giuseppe