[Alioth-staff-replacement] Taking over lists.alioth.debian.org

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 09:53:08AM +0000, Mike Gabriel wrote:
> Hi Dominic,
> 
> > Assumptions
> > -----------
> > 
> > * that there is general consensus that taking over the service in this
> >   way is appropriate
> > * that DSA will be willing to change DNS entries relating to
> >   lists.alioth.debian.org to support the migration, and otherwise
> >   support the service (eg by providing SSL certificates and similar
> >   administrative/integration tasks)
> > * that the existing alioth admins can assist by providing access to the
> >   existing installation for migration
> > * that mailman 2 will continue to be supported in Debian for the
> >   foreseeable future
> 
> I am fully with you on this and I am available for long-term maintenance of
> the mailman 2 site. I can help with the migration, as well.
> 
> Thanks for your summary write-up.

Thanks Mike. I think your question about paying for resources is
a good one; I was just taking what I thought was the path of least
resistance. If we want to look at getting a dedicated paid for (non-DSA)
infrastructure, that is probably a question for leader at debian.org.

We still need to get some buy-in from DSA (for the DNS delegation) and
current alioth admins (for access to data). I met with some resistance
on IRC (one objection (not from a DSA member) being that DSA wouldn't
want to continue with the unusual situtation of a non-DSA managed
debian.org service) but I've not heard anything directly from them on
this topic.

One thought I had was that it would not be a big impairment of the
service to host it on alioth-lists.debian.net (or some such), as long
as a DSA-run HTTP redirector could be installed at lists.alioth.debian.org
which should be a minimal amount of maintenance overhead. I think that
retaining lists.alioth.debian.org directly would be the best technical
solution but I understand that this may be organizationally problematic.

I assume DSA wouldn't want to run an MTA front-end for this (and indeed
it would make management of the service more complicated than it 
neesd to be), so the MX records would still need to point to a non-DSA
host.

I look forward to hearing from DSA team on this topic (I've added them
back into the CC for this email).

Best,
Dominic.