Fwd: Re: Unofficial repositories on 'debian' domains

[Andres Mejia]

This thread is from debian-devel. Would anyone here who had a lot of
experience working (or dealing) with Marillat like to respond?

~ Andres
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Stefano Zacchiroli" <leader at debian.org>
Date: Mar 5, 2012 2:41 AM
Subject: Re: Unofficial repositories on 'debian' domains
To: <debian-devel at lists.debian.org>

On Sun, Mar 04, 2012 at 10:59:39PM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> Looking at the front page of http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ today,
> I don't see a clear statement that it is unofficial.

Agreed.

I also find disturbing that the website seeks for donations without
making clear that donated money do not go to the Debian Project. That is
not necessarily done out of malice, of course, but it seems to live in
the same uncertainty about the "unofficiality" of the website that you
mention.

> But for new users and potential users, this distinction probably isn't
> obvious.  There is a reason that Debian has pursued trademark
> enforcement actions against various debian.xy domains.

Agreed, and I've been thinking about debian-multimedia.org since quite a
while. According to our trademark policy (present and draft), the
website is in violation of Debian trademark. As the website is
maintained by a Debian Developer, I'm sure we don't need that specific
aspect to come into some sort of amicable solution.

But before getting there, the question is whether the existence of the
website (and its popularity) poses problem to Debian reputation and/or
to the activity of official Debian multimedia packaging. I think this is
a question for the Debian Multimedia Maintainers (as in
<pkg-multimedia-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org>) to answer. If they
see a problem with debian-multimedia.org, we should get in touch with
the website maintainers and solve the issue.

> And to avoid singling out debian-multimedia.org, I think this
> confusion could just as well happen with repositories on
> foo.debian.net domains.

I think the situations with debian.net is quite different. *.debian.net
is a namespace offered by Debian to developers that want to setup
services which are not (yet) integrated in the Debian infrastructure
and, as such, not yet blessed as official project services. I don't
think we need to have any stricter procedure that the current one for
people to setup *.debian.net entries.

What we need, though, is probably to make it more clear to our users
what is the difference among *.debian.net and *.debian.org services. It
is something that developers know by folklore, but that I seriously
doubt most of our users know. For me, the most appropriate way to do is
to put a splash page at www.debian.net explaining that. If DSA agrees
with that approach, I'm sure we can easily come up with a suitable
splash text.

While we are at it, I also think we should provide an index of
*.debian.net entries on that splash page.
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianNetDomains is just too prone to outdateness
and incompleteness. The index can be automatically generated from LDAP
and. IIRC a past chat with DSA, DSA is fine with that but is aware of
privacy concerns that some of the registrant of *.debian.net entries
might have. Personally, I don't think we should be worried about privacy
concerns there. The debian.net is a Debian project resource and we
should be ready to advertise all its entries, otherwise people should
not register them in the first place.

Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli     zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences   ......   http://upsilon.cc/zack   ......   . . o
Debian Project Leader    .......   @zack on identi.ca   .......    o o o
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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