Who actually does have root? [was Re: Respository ...]

[Alan Coopersmith]

Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> In my very first email i asked who all had root access to the fd.o 
> machines. I haven't got an answer to that yet.

Did you ask the people who run freedesktop.org?   Once again, X.Org
uses their hosting services, but does not control or operate their
machines.   There's a separate mailing list for discussion of the
services that freedesktop.org provides to all the projects hosted there
(X, fontconfig, mesa, etc.)

> From irc, the day after this broke out, i saw that ajax and daniels 
> suspended their own fd.o root accounts, but keep their x.org accounts?
> Why only fd.o and not X.org? Why only suspension and not taking away 
> this access?

Huh?  What do you think an X.Org account is and what do you think they
can do with one?   The machines actually in the X.Org domain are either
freedesktop.org machines with CNAMES (the wiki & webserver), or unrelated
to code at all (expo.x.org).

> Is this really how people want to run a free software project? Where 
> only political affiliation means that your code is safe?

There is no political affiliation here, other than people who want to help
X.Org, and you who seem to want to attack it.

> And WTF, searching through my irc log, i dug up this:
> 
> --- Day changed Fri Nov 19 2010
> ...
> 04:13 < alanc> someone leave a git repo writable by too many people?  
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-radeonhd/commit/?h=spigot
> 04:14 < cjb> looks like a perfectly normal ajax commit to me
> 04:14 < alanc> except he usually signs his as ajax, not 
> root at jerkcity.com
> 04:15 < cjb> was kidding :)
> 04:15 < alanc> not that I'm disagreeing with the new autogen.sh there, 
> given it was the only commit in the last 6 months, but it would be more 
> useful on master
> 04:17 < mjg59> I'm not sure that that branch has always been there
> 
> WTF? Alan, why did you not act on this? Why didn't you mail 
> admins at fd.o?  Why are you spending your time bashing me for blowing this 
> open, and not talking to the admins, while all you did was 1) put this 
> on irc 2) shrug and walk away.

Because I don't track radeonhd development, didn't know if it was already
known, and didn't really have the time or desire to investigate.

And I am not bashing you for bringing it to people's attention - but for
going for maximum publicity in a way that seems to have the sole goal of
making X.Org look bad to everyone.   I don't like direct attacks on the
organization I put so much time into helping.

You could have mailed the admins or xorg-devel, and then if they didn't
deal with it, escalate from there, but instead you mailed the xorg list
(who has no one who could do any more than anyone on xorg-devel), and
made sure that a story got published to phoronix to show the world once
again how very persecuted you are.

Clearly you have no limits on the amount of mail you can send on this issue,
so it's not like you could only send one e-mail and lost all opportunity to
deal with it if that e-mail was not dealt with to your satisfaction.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System