Looking for new maintainer(s) for debbugs.gnu.org

[Glenn Morris]

Hi,

I'm looking for someone(s) to take over the maintenance of debbugs.gnu.org.
I'm aware that the help-debbugs mailing list doesn't have a big
readership, so please feel free to forward this advert elsewhere.

debbugs.gnu.org is a virtual machine hosted by address@hidden
It currently runs Debian 8, having been upgraded in-place through a
few Debian stable versions. It should be updated to Debian 9. Upgrades
between stable releases have been mostly straightforward in the past.
The FSF sysadmins wanted to provide a new VM to host the Debian 9 version.
This perhaps offers the opportunity to install a new system from scratch
in a more organized way. The current system has evolved in-place over
the years, with eg no true VCS for configuration files, local tweaks, etc.
Changes are made to the live system, with no separate test instance.

The job requires experience of GNU/Linux (ideally Debian-based) system
administration. The system runs a web-server (apache) and handles mail
(exim, spamassassin, mailman). If you want to hack on the actual
debbugs software, it's written in Perl. You should probably also sign
up as admin/moderator of the debbugs-submit mailman list, which is
used to filter all incoming mail.

Our debbugs installation has quite a few small modifications from
(an old version of) upstream debbugs. Ideally, our installation would be
rebased on the current upstream. See https://debbugs.gnu.org/26380 for
some work on this.

The actual day-to-day workload involved in just keeping the system
going is extremely small (close to zero). There would be some work up
front in the Debian 9 upgrade, and in putting a better organizational
system for local changes in place. Rebasing debbugs would be more
work, but again a one-off.

I expect to be available to answer any questions you might have during
the transition.

If you want more details, feel free to respond on help-debbugs or in
private.

Thanks!