Re: removing debian-consultants list

On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 01:02:13PM +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
> It seems that Brian May has done more woody back-ports than anyone else.
> 
> deb http://www.microcomaustralia.com.au/debian/ stable selinux main
> 
> The above apt line gets Brian's packages (you can skip the "selinux" part if 
> you don't want the SE patched versions of login etc).  Brian's site can 
> sustain a reasonable amount of use (although it's not particularly fast), if 
> that becomes an issue there is an option of a European mirror for better 
> bandwidth (Brian - is Tom mirroring the rest of your archive or just the SE 
> stuff?).

I believe he is mirroring everything.

> I think it would be good if we organized a consistant site for such back-ports 
> with designated people for different packages.  Brian, how difficult would it 
> be to set this up?

All the infrastructure is in place to allow anyone to upload that is
already in Debian.

The only think we would need is a place people can upload packages...

Care also needs to be taken with the upload queues to ensure a person
doesn't upload with an illegal filename and cause damage, I am not sure
what measures Debian uses here.

I would also need the public key of the maintainer.

> Also one thing that can be considered is paying people to back-port the 
> packages.  If you have a need for Postgresql to be back-ported and to have it 
> kept up to date with bug fixes etc then it might be easiest to just pay 
> someone like Brian $100 per month to do the work and email you whenever 
> there's a new package ready to be installed.  $100 per month is not much 
> money if your business depends on Postgres, but over the year it's enough pay 
> to make it worth-while for someone to fo the work properly.

Backporting the majority of packages is easy, I have a script that will
automatically download, add a changelog entry, compile, and upload.

Checking what packages need recompiling and it what order is not easy.

Testing that packages before I move them from unstable to stable
is downright time consuming (even though the testing is often very
primitive, and just checks the package installs OK).

> Another thing that springs to mind is backups.  It seems that all Linux backup 
> software is grossly inadequate, apart from the commercial software which is 
> ridiculously expensive, slightly inadequate, and has security issues.  If 
> someone has the funding then we could develop some better backup software for 
> Linux to address some of these issues.  Brian has suggested extending DAR for 
> network functionality.

I think I read someting somewhere about and ITP for a program that
allowed backups via rsync. I never got a chance to look at it yet
though, and don't have time to lookup the reference at this precise point
in time.
-- 
Brian May <[email protected]>


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