[6164] in Release_7.7_team
FWD: Merging Debathena and Athena 10
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Tue Jan 13 18:07:31 2009
In-Reply-To: <496D0F4B.9010709@mit.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v753.1)
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
Message-Id: <F4EB43A6-4E87-43FE-BF94-D27AEC68466D@mit.edu>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:05:50 -0500
To: athena10@mit.edu, release-team@mit.edu
X-Spam-Flag: NO
X-Spam-Score: 0.00
I spazzed and said, "Send a policy proposal to Athena10" when I
should have said, "Send a policy proposal to Athena10, copied to
release-team.
Could all further replies to this thread cross-post to both lists,
please.
Apologies to Athena10 list members for putting this same message in
your inbox a second time.
-Bill
---- Begin forwarded message: ----
From: Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>
Date: January 13, 2009 5:01:47 PM EST
To: athena10@mit.edu
Subject: Merging Debathena and Athena 10
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
