[834] in athena10
Merging Debathena and Athena 10
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Evan Broder)
Tue Jan 13 17:04:37 2009
Message-ID: <496D0F4B.9010709@mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:01:47 -0500
From: Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>
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(Ooh! Policy discussion!)
This should have been brought up well before now, but we should deal
with it before Athena 10 goes live.
It's really unfortunate that Athena 10 and Debathena are two separate
"products" from two separate websites with two separate apt repositories
maintaining two separate copies of packages that are exactly the same.
Jon and I have come up with "Athena 10 powered by Debathena", where
Athena 10 is the subset of Debathena that IS&T supports and "Debathena"
refers to everything else.
TIm has long suggested that, since Debathena (i.e. debathena.mit.edu)
currently has substantially more traction than Athena 10 (i.e.
athena10.mit.edu), we should merge athena10.mit.edu into
debathena.mit.edu and have IS&T take over the name debathena.mit.edu.
One of the things that is key to SIPB for this to be a viable plan is
that we don't completely lose all access to the apt repository. However,
IS&T is presumably concerned with non-payrolled (well, all of us aren't
on payroll) students being able to make changes to things like all the
clusters, and IS&T may also not be happy with us having direct access to
linux-build-10.
I think the best way to deal with this is twofold: (a) the list of SIPB
people who can contribute directly to Athena 10 should be kept short -
probably 3 or 4 people at most. (b) We should look into the various
tools that have been developed so that people can actually upload
packages as opposed to interacting with reprepro directly. We should
look in particular at what Ubuntu does, because they've actually fully
automated the upload -> build -> apt repository process (Debian hasn't).
This is probably something that should be discussed at the Release Team
meeting next week so that we can deal with the political and policy
issues. I'll be looking into how uploading, building, and so forth work,
although it'd be nice if other people could contribute to that effort as
well.
- Evan
