[3144] in SIPB-AFS-requests
Re: Problem with SIPB services
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (mhpower@MIT.EDU)
Mon Sep 14 23:55:13 1998
From: mhpower@MIT.EDU
To: cat@MIT.EDU
Cc: star-maintainers@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 23:55:04 EDT
>All SIPB mainters should make a brief, but clear listing of the
>requirments of a maintainer (for instance AFS maintainers require a
>level of knowledge in their maintainters.)
What makes this hard is that there really are no requirements. I mean,
there's no specific knowledge or background that's generally needed
for anything other than doing afs volume or afs server changes.
The main information that could be made available, or that probably
has an availability that isn't known well enough, is information about
just what is currently being done to maintain a service. I'd expect
that this is a lot of what people would like to know if they thought
they might want to help maintain the service; otherwise it'd be really
hard for them to tell whether they were actually interested or not.
This has two main parts. First, there could be more publicity that
a member or prospective who's interested in knowing exactly what is
happening with any service can be added to mailing lists or discuss
acls. Second, there could be more summary information provided during
meetings (in Computer Services) about anything that was done for any
service that could possibly be of interest to other people. I mean,
if the server-maintainer event were that "someone sent us mail about
whether FreeBSD was better than AIX, and we wrote back saying it was
up to them to decide", I really don't think it has to go in Computer
Services. But if the event was "we're starting to get lots of people
at MIT asking us about FreeBSD, and we don't know what to do about
it", then maybe it really ought to be mentioned at a meeting.
It's true that it's conceivable to have server maintainers continually
send out information to all members and prospectives about what skills
or interests happen to be most useful/relevant at a particular point
in time. The main problem here is that the relevant skills and
interests often change very frequently, even from week to week
(there's also a secondary problem that writing up this much
information would be a lot of additional work for people already
involved in maintaining a service). Again, there really aren't
requirements, and telling people that it'd be nice for them to be
familiar with SunOS kernels this week and familiar with building
Kerberos next week is not something I think is especially helpful. I'd
prefer that we try giving more publicity about the server-maintainer
lists being open to interested people, and try to announce more
server-related information in meetings (since that's a generally
useful way to advertise what sipb is doing).
Matt
