Re: Debian as an Associate Member of the OpenInfra Foundation

On 2021-12-10 19:59:33 +0000 (+0000), Jeremy Stanley wrote:
[...]
> I'm also separately giving any interested Debian Developers I know
> involved in OpenStack and the OpenInfra Foundation a heads up so
> they'll hopefully chime in with feedback, as I'm unsure how many
> of them actively follow spi-general.
[...]

Picking this back up from December, the thread garnered replies in
support from Debian Developers Thomas Goirand (a maintainer of the
OpenStack packages in Debian) and Allison Randal (an elected
individual director on the board of the OpenInfra Foundation). In
the meantime, I've also been granted contributing member status in
SPI and am happy to serve as a liaison between both organizations if
that helps.

What are the next steps for the proposal? Should I try to elicit
more feedback to the mailing list? Or is more information about the
foundation or its associate membership desired? Will I need to add
it to the SPI board meeting agenda for approval (I understand that
today's meeting is probably short notice, but perhaps April's)?

Also, it may be useful to point out a bit more background on
Debian's relevance to some of the other projects represented by the
OpenInfra Foundation besides OpenStack:

StarlingX is an "edge computing" focused GNU/Linux distribution.
Previously it was a Red Hat derivative, but their community decided
to pivot and redo their next major release as a Debian derivative
instead. They've been working with upstream project developers in
the various subsystems they've previously had to patch/fork in order
to whittle away at their divergence, with the hope of getting as
close as possible to eventually being a Debian Pure-Blend.

The OpenDev Collaboratory, a community-run development hosting
service, provides minimal Debian-based virtual machines in its CI
system in order for projects to be able to test that changes to
their software will work on Debian. OpenDev's sysadmins are also the
primary upstream developers for a number of upstream projects
included in Debian, such as the git-review client, or the
python3-gear and python3-gerritlib libraries.

The Zuul "project gating" and CI/CD software, while not yet packaged
in Debian itself, supports the use of Debian as a test platform in
its standard jobs library, and tests all of its changes on Debian
(as well as on other distributions of course). Its published
container images are also built on the Python community's base
images, which are in turn built from the semi-official Debian
container images.

Thanks as always for your feedback and assistance.
--
Jeremy Stanley, Open Infrastructure Foundation Staff