Hello fellows from Debian CD and Debian Cloud teams, As you may know, Oracle is interested on getting official Debian images on their cloud platform[1]. I've been working with them on this matter and now that we have a proper way to build those images using bootstrap-vz (the code is not yet on upstream, but is available on my fork[2]), we would like to do what is needed to call them "official". Emmanuel Kasper remembered[3] us of the guidelines for official images[4] and I talked with Steve McIntyre in private about this.
Today, I took a few hours to read again the entire thread (and related off-thread messages) started by Martin Zobel-Helas[5] regarding Debian images on Azure, which brought the matter to our attention in the last November. Right now my main concern is: we need a custom kernel (compressed with gzip instead of xz), otherwise the instance will not be able to boot on the current version of Oracle Compute Cloud Service. This is a point that Brian Gupta cited on a pretty detailed message[6], in a reference to this 2013 thread[7], which states that in the need of a custom kernel on an official image, it should be built and maintained by Debian Developers. I'm not yet a DD, so that's why Ben Hutchings is cc'ed - maybe he can help us on what we can do about it. Another important point, brought up by Bastian Blank[8], is that Debian Machine Usage Policies[9] forbids usage of "Debian Facilities for private financial gain or for commercial purposes". I haven't charged Oracle for anything yet, but they are interested in paying someone to do this in the long-run. At the same time, both Raphael Hertzog[10] and Brian Gupta[11] remembered that many people are paid to work on Debian. So I'm a little bit lost regarding what part of Debian infrastructure can and cannot be used while being paid by third parties. For instance, if anyone updates a package on behalf of some company, is buildd usage accounted as "private usage for paid work"? The same would apply for an image built on Debian CD hardware? By the end of the discussion, both Debian CD, Debian Cloud and Debian Trademark reached an agreement[12][13], where both "Debian", "Debian Cloud" or "Debian Jessie" names could be used by those images (as it has been used by images made for Amazon EC2), not mentioning "official". At the same time, the first item of the proposal[14] says that they will be considered "Official" Debian images. So I'm kinda confused about the usage of the word "official". Also, was there any discussions regarding the policy[15], to be draft from this proposal, that is expected to be finished by the release of Stretch? I haven't found any threads about this digging though the "debian-cd" and "debian-cloud" archives. Regards, Tiago. [1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/08/msg00017.html [2]: https://github.com/myhro/bootstrap-vz/tree/oracle [3]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00018.html [4]: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/OfficialImages [5]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00005.html [6]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00016.html [7]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2013/04/msg00068.html [8]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00037.html [9]: https://www.debian.org/devel/dmup [10]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00047.html [11]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00063.html [12]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00086.html [13]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00088.html [14]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00093.html [15]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00099.html -- Tiago "Myhro" Ilieve Blog: https://blog.myhro.info/ GitHub: https://github.com/myhro LinkedIn: https://br.linkedin.com/in/myhro Montes Claros - MG, Brasil
