Waiting on DSA

A brief case study in a flamewar diverted.

The release managers are currently preparing a followup to the architecture requalification, following the efforts made over the past couple of months. Four ports are currently looking shaky, namely m68k, arm, s390 and sparc. An early draft begins going into the details by saying the following:

ARM has been borderline on a lot of the criteria, which we were willing to consider waiving; but there are two points in particular which we aren’t willing to waive. First is that the porting machine for arm, debussy.debian.org, has been off-line now for a number of months, and a replacement machine has not yet been activated by DSA. […]

Even without the already existing tensions on debian-devel and elsewhere, I’d expect the RM posting the above to the developers announcement list to immediately result in hue and cry about DSA trying to kill arm and how unfair and inappropriate that was. And I can’t even say that’d be unreasonable.

OTOH, I can say it would’ve been unjustified, enough so that the above won’t actually make it out to -devel-announce. Why? Read on past the fold.

The draft, of course, was based on the arm requalification page in the wiki, which at the time said the following in regard to a porting machine for arm:

Vince Sanders (Kyllikki) maintains a machine to which developers can be given specific access. Accessibility by developers is waiting for DSA to set up, at which point it will become jennifer.debian.org. In the meantime it is jennifer.kyllikki.org port 1022. Mail vince@debian.org to ask for an account.

europa.debian.org, a netwinder(233Mhz), hosted at Xandros, adminned by Woody Suwalski <woody@xandros.com>. Ex-buildd machine. Awaiting DSA action to make it general-developer access.

elara.debian.org, a netwinder(233Mhz), hosted at Xandros, adminned by Woody Suwalski <woody@xandros.com>. Ex-buildd machine. Awaiting DSA action to make it general-developer access.

(It also listed a couple of other machines that will likely be available soon, but they’re irrelevant for this)

The “Awaiting DSA action” notes were added by Wookey, who shouldn’t be confused with the Woody mentioned above, a few weeks ago, probably to record a brief discussion about elara and europa that took place on the debian-arm last month, initiated by the aforemented Woody (not Wookey). Here are some key tracts:

I have a feeling that nobody has been using Elara and Europa since April.

Woody, Nov 03

Most urgently,arm port is missing a developer accessible machine. Basicly it would have sarge/etch/sid chroots debian developers could log into to debug problems in their packages.

Riku Voipio, Nov 04

For europa and elara, a word from James (former buildd admin and europa+elara admin) is required before the machines can be used for anything else. I don’t like hijacking machines only because he doesn’t respond.

Joey, Nov 04

Joey is Martin Schulze, who’s a DSA member among other things. The thread resumed later in the month:

To James: another 2 weeks have passed without any sign of life from you… Elara and Europa sit idle since April…

Woody, Nov 17

Last I heard, James was busy in Ubuntu Below Zero. Not sure how long that’s going to take, though.

Wouter Verhelst, Nov 18

The arm port badly needs a developer-accessible machine for people to use when they get arm-specific bugs. Does the hosting for your machines allow them to be used for this purpose (it has been suggested that this may not be permitted)? This would mean that all Debian developers with a key in the keyring had access to the box(es). If this is a problem then Steve McIntyre has offered to host and admin the machines for this purpose.

Wookey, Nov 22

And we’re up to the point of editing the wiki, and it’s pretty clear how we got there.

At this point I suggested that the release team might want to actually talk to James to see what was actually going:

<aj> vorlon: sounds like the arm developer machine isn’t a terribly hard problem to fix, particularly compared to binutils support?
<aj> (also, sounds like we could use some uptime graphs for the buildd machines)
<vorlon> aj: in theory; actually, kylliki suggests that pb may be doing binutils upstream, but for some reason that’s not yet documented on the wiki, whereas the porter box being down has been known for months and nothing’s happened yet…
<aj> vorlon: right, but that’s something for DSA to fix, not the arm porting community afaics? have you had a chat with elmo about it yet?
<vorlon> no
<aj> vorlon: that’d seem to be the thing to do, then?
<vorlon> Vancouver was supposed to make it all better so I didn’t have to get involved with the details of porter machines ;P
<aj> vorlon: you’re getting involved with it now by posting to d-d-a
<aba> aj: I had a chat with someone from the DSA team about the developer machine, and result is the porters need to find out what happens with the “old” machines …
<aj> vorlon: i’d go for something like “there hasn’t been a decision yet made on which machine should be activated by DSA so all developers can automatically activate it; the release team are working on resolving this, and have waived this requirement in the meantime”
<vorlon> uh
<aba> aj: basically, I don’t think the release team should work on that – and besides, I see it as an no-op to waive this requirement

Andy Barth is aba, Steve Langasek is vorlon, I’m aj. There’s a reasonable amount of stuff trimmed from that, I mostly wanted to capture the point that the RMs both wanted not to take on that role of facilitating communication. After all, communication’s an O(N^2) problem (or O(2^N) depending on how you count), and N’s already 1000 or more for Debian.

At this point I chatted with vorlon some more via private msg, and pinged James to see if he was around. I got a response ten minutes later or so noting that (a) elara and europa had been setup as buildds a couple of days ago, and, more importantly, that (b) the local admin, ie Woody, wasn’t willing to have them have logins for 900 developers, so they couldn’t be porting machines in the first place.

We passed this on to Steve, who it turned out had already been told about europa and elara, but with the wiki saying otherwise, and it being 6am localtime for him by now, hadn’t recalled that point. He then spoke to James about Kyllikki’s “jennifer” box, was told James knew nothing about it, and finally asked Kyllikki to mail DSA about setting it up. He also asked to be Cc’ed.

There are lots of things that could’ve been done to resolve this situation, but I think two are particularly relevant. The very first thing that could’ve been done was for Woody and Wookey (and the other -arm) folks to talk more to make sure they weren’t at cross-purposes on elara and europa’s suitability as a porting machine. At no point did anyone on -arm point out explicitly that a porting machine would have 900 or so accounts, and at no point was there an explicit indication that they could be porting machines — yet that ended up as a fact on the wiki anyway.

The second way to resolve it that I want to mention is what actually happened: interested bystanders who wanted to avoid a flamewar actively talking to relevant folks, and making sure that what we think’s going on is actually what’s going on, and trying to help resolve it.

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