When I discussed the deprecation of cvs.debian.org, I forgot to mention that planet’s CVS repository was also part of the last users of this service.

Thanks to mako, the move to Alioth is underway. The CVS repository has been disabled (crude hack, if you know a proper way to forbid commits to a CVS repository, please leave a comment) and its history has been imported in a new SVN repository

As usual DD have write-access on this repository so that they can add/update their feeds and hackergotchis. Mako will change the live setup from CVS to SVN somewhat later today.

Please start updating any documentation that refers to the CVS repository.

It’s very difficult to discuss with DSA and make things evolve if none of the DSA member express an interest in something related to your goal: here comes an example of a story like another in my desperate quest to try to help the DSA team. 🙂

Last time gluck ran out of space, a few non-DSA people (me, taggart, Ganneff, and others I might have forgotten) contacted people to ask them to clean their home directories. Following that discussion we discussed a bit about the opportunity to move some services from gluck on another host. Among the services on gluck, there’s cvs.debian.org. As an Alioth administrator, it struck me that cvs.debian.org is the only VCS service that’s handled by the DSA team. It seems logical to not duplicate the administrative work and have all the VCS repositories handled by the same team.

The logical conclusion is that cvs.debian.org should be deprecated in favor of Alioth. So I made the suggestion in RT ticket #146 (login with guest/readonly). I got exactly zero response from DSA. No support and no opposition. So I went ahead and contacted the last users of cvs.debian.org:

• webwml: the website team
• debian-doc: the Debian documentation project
• debian-admin: the DSA team (this was already suggested in April this year in ticket #44, no response of course… except elmo saying me that he’s in favor. On IRC I also discovered that neuro doesn’t like bzr and is thus not in favor of such a move. Furthermore he visibly wants to keep control on userdir-ldap, thus he probably has not much interest in moving to a distributed system.)
• buildd: the Packages-arch-specific file is maintained in the dak cvs…

All in all, the debian-doc and debian-www folks are rather supportive of the move, but it requires adjustment to the build infrastructure, in particular to keep track of the status of translations. I have no answer from DSA and the buildd guys however.

The web team started a wiki page to evaluate the VCS that they would switch to. Volunteers would be welcome to organize the conversion of the repositories and to fix the build infrastructure accordingly. This a nice little project for new contributors that want to learn. 🙂

Since march the DSA team uses a request tracker to handle all the requests that they get.

Therefore you should no more use the debian-admin@debian.org alias (DSA members only). The debian-admin@lists.debian.org mailing list (DSA + local admins) is also scheduled for removal. Instead you should mail admin@rt.debian.org making sure to put “Debian RT” somewhere in the subject (crude but working spam prevention). By default, your ticket ends up in a private incoming queue. Up to now only DSA members had access to those queues. They moved most tickets in the public queue but it happened several times that this simple administrative burden took several weeks.

Since a few days, Matt Taggart and myself have been granted RT accounts with required privileges to handle tickets and move them between the various queues. So from now on, all tickets will be quickly moved in the public queue (when they don’t contain sensitive information of course). We’ll be able to do some triage and ping DSA members for urgent requests.

Matt and me have been trying to help out the DSA team for quite some time now, and while we’re not DSA with root rights, we’re in regular contact with the members (except Martin “Joey” Schulze who refuses to join the DSA IRC channel, who doesn’t use the request tracker and who doesn’t read the DSA mails either) and with several local admins. So if you have some troubles interacting with the DSA team, you can try to get in touch with us and we’ll see if we can help you.

In too many cases people contact directly individual DSA members (Joey in particular). Please refrain from doing so, other volunteers (who might help you) won’t notice your request. Furthermore systematic request tracker usage helps us identifying what is well handled and what’s not. And it’s not more complicated than a simple email for you.

Update: currently local admins are not subscribed to the request tracker. The RT setup will need some further adjustment for that, so the debian-admin@lists.debian.org list can still be useful if you want to reach them.

Sam is our new DPL. The margin with the second (Steve McIntyre again!) is very slim, 8 votes. And Steve only has 25 votes more than me. That’s not much either.

What we can learn from this election:

• the principle of a DPL board makes its way, I have been ranked well above NOTA and I have been mainly advocating this proposal (and this despite some votes anti-dunc-tank that I probably suffered from)
• my selection of board members was pretty good, the 4 candidates that I selected for the board are the top-4 of the election
• Debian developers are fed up by the various problems in some core teams (overwhelmed, not recruiting new members, not communicating enough, etc.). I’ll try to help Sam fix those issues, but it’s going to be a big challenge for us.

In the end, I really hope that sam is going to find a way to cooperate closely with the various candidates that are still highly motivated to work on improving Debian. I doubt that he will choose a board structure (although I would be glad to be proven wrong!), but I really hope that he will expand the 2IC principle (or something similar).

I once told sam that he would have my full support if he got elected, and I intend to stand up to this promise. I said that because I share many of his ideas. The few fears that I have are mainly on how he is going to try to address these issues. But I have no reason to believe that he’s not going to listen to what we (and I) have to say. That’s why he got ranked just after me on my ballot.

Good luck Sam, do not disappoint us!