The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: dchanges, architecture component, parseable filenames

Ian Jackson:
> 1. Is use of dchanges mandatory now ?

It will be mandatory when we automate the archive-submission process.
That means we have some time to get it to the point where all
maintainers are happy with it, and then it will be cast in concrete.

> If so, what are we to do when it refuses to accept our uploads ?

Complain, and work out a fix with the maintainer.

> 2. Is signing release announcements mandatory ?

It can not be mandatory for people who can not make legal use of PGP.
These people may have degraded service as far as archive submission
is concerned, as they may need more manual intervention by the
archive maintainer.

> 3. Is uploading a .changes file as well as posting an announcement
>    mandatory ?

Uploading a .changes file is mandatory. For now, you can fudge the
format or do it by hand. Take pity on Carl Streeter - maintaining
that archive is a lot of work and the changes file helps him do his
job.

Posting an announcement is important but not mandatory. Eventually,
the announcement will be made from the .changes file (with suitable
reformatting) automaticaly or when the archive maintainer installs
your file.

> 4. Do package filenames need to contain an architecture component ?

It will be mandatory when automated archive submission is in place.
Currently we do not cross-compile when we release packages - this 
will not always be the case. Note that the 68k release is coming to
fruition - there is a full archive of packages there.

> 5. Do package .deb files need to contain Section and Priority fields ?

I think dselect works a lot better with a "Section" field, and if you
want a Priority field you should say so. Whether this is mandatory
is up to you, Ian.

> but we need to
> have a specification of the [dchanges] output format that is
> separate from the implementation.

That's a fair request. Andy, can you write this with any necessary
additional input from Ian and Carl?

> 2. Use of PGP: fine, but a statement needs to be made by Carl as soon
> as the policy is firm.

We've established that some people _can_not_ use it. I think in the
long run we benefit from those who can use it doing so. We are going
to get Trojan-horsed eventually whether we use it or not, but using
it will make it more difficult for a trojan to get by.

> The most aesthetic option for (e) I can think of at the moment is
> replacing hyphens with underscores in the package name.

That sounds fair to me. Unless I hear a chorus of "that's repulsive"
and "this way is better", there may not be a need for a vote. The
proposal is to make the package file name be:

PACKAGE_NAME: [^-]*	# Anything but hyphen. Hyphens are replaced
			# by underbars automaticaly.

VERSION_NAME: [^-]*	# With emphasis to use something that
			# can be sorted reliably. This may mean
			# converting "Beta1" to a ".1" on the end
			# of a number, etc.

SUFFIX: {deb,tar.gz,diff.gz,changes}

FILENAME: PACKAGE_NAME-VERSION_NAME.SUFFIX



	Thanks

	Bruce