[newmaint-site] Input from FOSDEM

[Enrico Zini]

Hello,

I'm on my way back from FOSDEM sorting all the ideas I noted down from
all the conversations I had. These are those related to Debian
Contributors:

 * Data source data backup/restore

Myon was concerned that, for a data source that sends incremental
updates, a wrong submission may be hard to undo.

The site could generate and keep downloadable backups for each data
source in the format of a submission. In that way one can "restore" a
backup simply by downloading it and resubmitting it.


 * Accountability for data source configuration

At the moment the configuration of any data source is editable by any
DD. Me and Myon thought it's a good thing, because it means that anyone
could fix a typo in a description, or take care of a data source whose
admins are currently inactive.

However, now any DD can see any data source auth token, and that makes
us a bit uneasy, since it means that anyone can mess up any data source,
in good or bad faith, without leaving an audit trail.

The idea to deal with this is to show the auth token only to those who
are admins for a data source, while still allowing anyone to add
themselves as admins.

Then, since the site already has an audit log for each user, which I
initially coded for logging identity management changes, we can use the
same log to log data source configuration operations. This means that we
could know who has had access to a source's auth token at a given time,
and also log who did what changes to the data source configuration.

That means we can also show the 'delete' button for data sources only to
their admins.


 * Presentation

Since a few days ago, ftp-master is sending package maintenance and
upload information, and that means that the site should now show *at the
very least* all contribution information we knew of so far.

I think that this marks the time when I can stop considering the site a
prototype, and start considering it fully and properly launched.

This probably means that the wording in the site pages (like
the http://contributors.debian.org page itself) needs a review to say
what we think the site is, rather than what we hope the site will be.

Myon has mentioned that the various contributor lists in the site have a
lot of empty page space, and suggested considering some more data-dense
layout, say display:inline or multi-column lists. He also suggested
grouping contributors by month, instead of showing the contribution
month for each contributor.

I thought it could be interesting to also show teams/data sources that
had activity in each month, so that the pages can not only show who is
doing anything, but also what is being done in Debian.

Performance-wise, computing the contributor list is currently a heavy
query on the database, full of complex aggregations. This can be sped up
by precomputing the aggregations in the nightly maintenance into an
aggregation table that is used only for querying.

Myon also mentioned that he'd like to link to a contributors.debian.org
person page from DDPO, but we currently miss a landing page that can
identify a person by email. The site already has a function that fill
find if a string looks like a fingerprint, an email or a login, and it
can be used in a view that identifies a person by identifier and
redirects to the person page.


 * New data sources

One person in the public in my talk mentioned that he would like to file
wishlist bugs asking for new data sources. I like the idea, and probably
a wiki page is enough.

Ideas for new data sources:
 - "debconf visitor" data source (a good case for implementing
   opt-in-only data sources)
 - ask the Debian Secretary to provide a "voter" data source
 - debian certifier data source, with people in keyrings who sign keys
 - data source editors data source, generated by contributors.debian.org
   itself when people edit a data source configuration. Very meta.

Since I spent some time talking to Myon who is also involved with
carnivore/mia, we figured that we have a lot of overlap and we should
find some time to talk about sharing bits and code.

I just had an idea for a "thankyou.debian.*" service feeding on
contributors.debian.org persons/identifiers, where people can send
"thank you" messages to debian contributors, à-la reportbug --kudos.
Each thank you received could count as a contribution. Such a think
could be used to list people who run debian booths, people who encourage
people to contribute to Debian, and so on. Basically, a "thank/record a
contribution" site.


Ciao,

Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/newmaint-site/attachments/20140204/5c71c66f/attachment.sig>