On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 10:22:24AM -0800, Chuan-kai Lin wrote: > On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 02:26:48PM +0100, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote: > > Secondly, yes, I've been informed that there was not many acitivity > > lately, but didn't yet follow up. I'll do so soon. > > If you want to privately notify someone about suspected inactivity, > > you can do so via [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Could you explain these two bits? (No, this is a serious question.) I > was following Section 7.4 of the developer's reference, and private > notification of suspected inactivity through [EMAIL PROTECTED] is not > listed anywhere in that section. Contacting QA is supposed to be the > final step after you have looked at his packages, inquired on -devel and > such to make sure that the developer is indeed missing. > > What happens after a message is sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You > mentioned that you will follow up soon, and what is your (or QA's) role > in this procedure?
I realize these things are quite obscure (still). The obscurity is not intentional, just lack of time to properly document things. I'll give quick summary here, and will try to get things properly documented after I've given a talk about Quality Assurance in the FOSDEM Debian developers room next month in Brussel, and discussed this with some more people. [EMAIL PROTECTED] is an email alias for the people maintaining and acting upon the MIA database[1], a collections of mail exchanges with DD and non-DD maintainers that have in any way raised suspection of inactivity (in a significant number of cases, this suspection later turns out to be wrong). The 'open' cases are continuously processed whenever communication was a certain time ago, and then mostly mails are sent to the maintainer in question. If after repeated mails someone doesn't reply, all their packages get orphaned, otherwise, if a reply is sent, there is acted upon, in a number of cases, maintainers agree to orphan some or all of their packages, for example. This deals with lots of maintainers, and recall the google-reason I cited in my previous mail. There are of course 'false positives' or just inquiries about time-committment concerns, sometimes really private issues are involved (for example, sickness, family situation, ...). Because of these reasons, mia-mails are not really suited for public discussion, and therefore held private. I try to ask sponsors/co-maintainers and other related people around a maintainer, usually, but choose not to ask on -devel. > And finally, are there plans to update the Developer's Reference to > reflect this change in standard procedure? Yes, while this procedure hasn't really been discussed much, it's now just de-facto how it happens. After FOSDEM I will work with the Developer's Reference maintainer(s) to get the documentation updated. Thanks, --Jeroen [1] Previously almost exclusively Martin Michlmayr, now pretty much exclusively done by myself, although having a few more people would be nice -- Jeroen van Wolffelaar [EMAIL PROTECTED] (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357) http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]