Re: Counting the votes

[Vincent Untz <vincent vuntz net>]

[sending this back to membership-committee]

Le jeudi 11 décembre 2003, a 00:48, Vincent Untz a ecrit :
> Just to let you know what's happening: right now, I'm trying to fix the
> vote counting script. It is supposed to work, but for some reasons, the
> authentication tokens are not valid...
>
> I'm working on it right now.

Ok. After a few hours, I've reached the main problem. Let me explain a
bit the thing...

The ballots were sent using a special account on canvas.gnome.org for
different reasons (the most important one being the traffic generated by
all those ballots). After the Debian servers have been compromised, this
account was disabled for security reasons.

This is why there was a delay sending new ballots to people who lost
their ballots. After a while, I was sent the necessary files to resend
the ballots from my home machine.

Now, the problem come from the authentication tokens. It seems there's a
bug somewhere because if I calculate a token on my home machine (or on
another machine I have access to), I don't get the same token than the
one calculated on canvas.gnome.org. I do think the bug is in the perl
md5 module on canvas.

And thus, it's not possible to count the votes right now. At least for
me. Does any of you have an account on canvas? If yes, you might be able
to do a first count of the votes.

This causes lots of problems:
        * people might be unable to verify the results (running the
          script won't work)
        * the resent ballots have 'new/valid' tokens (calculated on my
          home machine) which are not considered as valid if we count
          the votes on canvas
        * I am unable to count the votes right now (but I'm asking for
          an account on canvas)
        * probably more problems...

For all these reasons, we might delay the preliminary results.

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas presses.