On 8/12/2011 2:27 AM, Andrea Pescetti wrote:
Rob Weir wrote:
On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 6:00 PM, Dave Fisher<[email protected]>
wrote:
(2) openoffice.org registered users.
Should we have a way to maintain openoffice.org email aliases? Who do
we do this for?
Yes Dave, it is important to save those aliases. On the users side, the
@openoffice.org e-mail addresses were a little but nice strategic
element in community building. On the practical side, the
@openoffice.org alias was/is used as the username in Bugzilla, in other
sites belonging to the OpenOffice.org infrastructure (QATrack and at
least one of Templates and Extensions); password recovery messages and
Bugzilla notifications are sent to those aliases.
Of course, this could be fixed by scripting, but it might be (but I
couldn't check the real code) that some services rely on the identity
"e-mail address for user USERNAME = [email protected]"; and these
would be broken.
Personally, I do not see how (policy-wise) that we'd continue to
maintain any non-official or non-committer email accounts at the
openoffice.org domain in the future. But this is a larger issue that
could use it's own thread. Apache provides basic email addresses (not
necessarily mail storage) only for committers, typically, so potentially
extending (or, keeping) email addresses to a much larger body of
non-committers requires real thought.
I understand the issue of maintaining logins to existing systems where
practical, but I would urge the team to consider focusing instead on how
any new (or migrated) Apache OOo bugtrackers, forums, etc. would work
instead of figuring out how to maintain every bit of old functionality
from past OOo sites.
The problem we're going to run into is that there are both official
openoffice.org email addresses, like [email protected],
[email protected], [email protected]. And then there are user
accounts at the same domain, given out rather freely.
This remark by Rob Weir is absolutely true, unfortunately. And what's
worse is that, as far as I know, there is no way to discriminate between
"official" and "personal" addresses. Several years ago, the Italian N-L
project created an alias [email protected] (means "schools") for a
-never properly launched- project about OpenOffice.org in Italian
schools. And this was registered by merely "squatting" a free address
since we knew no way to officially reserve an alias, and I suspect that
the other "official" aliases you list could have been registered this
way as well.
I would suggest (roughly), figuring out a migration for any important
system email addresses/accounts (hostmaster@, webmaster@, whatever) and
Apache committer's accounts, and then plan at some announced date to
turn off email features for all other oo.o email addresses. If
necessary, the PPMC could decide - if contacted by existing account
holders who have been active and productive - to re-enable selected
email accounts on a one-by-one decision basis.
In my Branding view, the PPMC will need to address and remove any of
these email or domain squatters. It is not acceptable to allow
non-community members to squat or make use of official ASF domain names
or services. But we do have time to discuss how to do this.
Regards,
Andrea.
- Shane
