Re: Question to all candidates: how is Debian doing?

On Wednesday, April 09 2025, Philipp Kern wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 09, 2025 at 09:35:52AM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
>> 2/ There are also semi-official services hosted under the debian.net
>> domain. They are set up in a completely bottom-up way, without any
>> interaction with DSA. They are rarely co-maintained, and are thus quite
>> sensitive to the bus factor.
>> 
>> Since it's easy to set up debian.net services, and *necessarily* a bit
>> painful and time-consuming to go through the steps required for turning
>> a service into a .debian.org service, there are some unofficial services
>> that remain unofficial but should really be turned into official
>> services.
>
> In this case this service started out contentious because mirroring of
> -debug happened without any ratelimiting in a way that kept DSA busy -
> instead of working with us and the mirror team to ensure that the goal
> is met.

This is not entirely correct.

Yes, there was a ratelimiting problem indeed.  And yes, the interaction
with the mirror team was contentious (it keeps puzzling me why we treat
each other in such an adversarial way on Debian, but I digress).

I have always tried to work with the DSA/mirror teams to make sure that
everything was OK, but there was just a constant lack of responses and
information on how to properly mirror -dbg packages.  I noticed that
only asking on IRC wasn't going to solve the problem, so I decided to
try and do things by myself.

At the time I set up the service I was not able to find the mirroring
information myself, and the very few replies I got back suggested that I
should use aptly or something similar.  This proved to be a burden on
the infrastructure, which led to the issues you mentioned.

> I asked some simple questions back in December on [1] to show that we
> are willing to help out here. As Sergio admitted there was no followup.

Correct.  I have to say though, one of the reasons I am finding myself
less enthusiastic about pursuing this more formal arrangement is
*exactly* because of the contentious interactions I have experienced in
the past.  You were not involved in these interactions, of course.

Thanks,