Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Developer Retirements
2009/3/10 Doug Goldstein car...@gentoo.org: So really an effective solution might be for the recruiters/retirement staff to change a user's shell with a script that spits out a message that says something to the effect of: You have been inactive for a while. Please contact recruiters to re-enable your account. This was done as a security measure. Obviously a little friendlier would be better but everyone gets the gist. That'll prevent them from logging into infra boxes and from being able to do a commit. First of all there's been a lot of returning devs from whom I heard no word of complaint about the procedure. Bonsaikitten is one of them if this argument really requires an example. Now, if someone can't, has no time or is unwilling to redo his quiz... what makes you think this person will make a good developer later on? What will ensure quality of his contributions? After months or (in most cases) years of not being a developer it's very likely the person is out of touch with most current things in Gentoo and a conversation with a recruiter may be really good learning experience. I heard multiple times from recruiters that this is procedure is necessary for returning developers. If you ask them, I'm sure they will confirm those devs often need such refreshing and also are appreciating the time put into it from the recruiting team. Finally, what you are proposing (which I read as infra suspending their access automatically instead of me or other undertaker contacting the person first) far harsher and putting off than pretty soft (and many say too soft) procedures we have now. I personally would prefer to talk to such a person before suspending them anything happens. Please also remember that if we suspend access automatically and it's suspended for some time, it will require jumping through hoops upon returning just like one has to jump through them when being recruited back. I don't think QA will allow us to just give access back without prior checking if the person is current with everything a developer should know. And if they did allow that, I wouldn't consider this a good thing. Kind regards, Lukasz Damentko
Re: [gentoo-dev] devs on IRC (was :Regen2 ( was QA Overlay Layout support ))
2009/3/10 Markos Chandras hwoar...@gentoo.org: Gentoo as a project could realize more of its potential by better integrating people who dont do IRC. Yes. Let's integrate them by introducing IRC to them.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements
Okay, let me explain in detail. Undertakers contact devs who didn't touch CVS for at least two months, are considered inactive in the bugzilla and have no current .away set. After the initial contact, something like 3/4 of e-mailed people respond very quickly and explain why they are gone (usually family and work trouble, weddings, army service, health issues, moving out/in and so on, so called real life) and in such cases we do not retire them but let them resolve whatever trouble they are in and return to the project afterwards. There are dozens of devs in the project who had such a conversation with me or other undertakers and all can confirm retirement was abandoned right away after they gave valid reasons for their absence and the only consequence was poking about missing .away and asking when they are planning to get back to work. Those people wouldn't even be contacted if their .aways stated why they are gone and for how long. Therefore a REMINDER: Please do set your .away. Thanks. The rest are usually people who already gave up on the project, just for various reasons didn't say bye yet. They often have no commits for many months despite undertakers poking them a bunch of times. Half a year period without even touching CVS and bugs isn't that uncommon for them. I can give you specific examples if you really want some. I'd prefer to avoid pointing fingers at people though. Those folks either say goodbye to everyone after being contacted by us or do not respond at all, in which case, if we get no response to our two e-mails and an open retirement bug from them after more than a month, we consider them missing in action and go on with their retirement. If they appear suddenly at any point of this procedure and say they want to stay, we either abandon retirement completely or only send them to recruiters to redo their quizzes if their absence was extremely long. I don't think how we can proceed differently in above kinds of situations. Do you suggest we stopped e-mailing people who seem gone from the project (how would we find out those who are really gone then?), stopped retiring people who mail -dev/-core and say goodbye or stopped retiring people who aren't responding to their mail and bugs named Retire: Person's Name for months? There's only one controversial group of inactive devs: There are some people who would prefer to stay in the project although they can't really give a good reason what for. Usually they claim they belong to a number of projects although they don't put any regular work into any of them and leads of this projects often haven't even heard there's such a person on board. They sometimes were members of this projects years ago, sometimes wanted to be members and sometimes only imagine they are members of them. I can give specific examples if you insist. Those we try to encourage to find a new job within Gentoo and often they do. I can name one who yesterday did start his new Gentoo work after years of slacking. :-) They are the smallest group of those we contact and process, I could maybe name 5 or 6 of those currently in Gentoo and that's it. There's no pending retirement of such a person currently. Really. Situation you name, when someone wanted to stay in Gentoo despite not doing any actual work and got retired happened once or maybe twice during the last year out of about a hundred retirements we have processed. And all were extreme cases of close to zero activity over many years with no promise of it ever increasing. We consider those very carefully, they are always consulted with devrel lead. This kind of decision isn't made lightly I can assure you. Finally, if someone really wants to be a dev but got retired, he can return to Gentoo within couple of weeks by reopening his retirement bug, submitting quizzes to recruiters and waiting to get useradded. Recruiters process returning devs extremely fast so returning to Gentoo if someone really wants to isn't a problem at all. And there's absolutely no way anyone from undertakers could stop someone from being recruited again. So summarising, the situation you're complaining about is extremely marginal. You are invited to subscribe to retirement@ alias and read its logs on bugzilla and see for yourself how rare occurrence it is. I hope I explained everything completely. I'm happy to take questions if you have any, and of course am open to suggestions. Kind regards, Lukasz Damentko
Re: [gentoo-dev] Jeeves IRC replacement now alive - Willikins
2008/8/6 Robin H. Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hi folks, Sorry that it's taken this long to get completed, but the Jeeves replacement, Willikins, is finally 99% done, and ready to join lots of channels. Please make the bot join #gentoo-server and #gentoo-releng. agaffney will be the contact for those. Thanks in advance.
Re: [gentoo-dev] bugzilla unscheduled downtime
2008/8/24 Andrey Falko [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 1:13 AM, Robin H. Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 12:09:41AM -0700, Robin H. Johnson wrote: One of the DB cluster boxes seems to have spontaneously rebooted around 03:13:53 UTC. Sorry, that's the time the kernel started up again. So it went down 2-3 minutes before that, right around the start of the daily database backup (03h10). I'm working on tracing why now (and why Nagios didn't yell at us). Bugzie down until I've fixed it. I fixed the symptoms on the box, but no luck on the cause yet. I'll fix the Nagios tommorow. If it breaks again tonight, find somebody in -infra to turn off the apache on the web node, or have them phone me. If you deleted any CC entries between 03h10 and 08h00 UTC, they might have come back, but everything else merged perfectly (file a bug if you spot any other corruption). -- Robin Hugh Johnson Gentoo Linux Developer Infra Guy E-Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG FP : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85 Is it me or is bugzilla still down? Or has it gone down again? I can't access it, nor can some of my friends. Please be patient. Robin is working on it at the moment. It's the same problem as yesterday. Kind regards, Lukasz Damentko
Re: [gentoo-dev] Jeeves IRC replacement now alive - Willikins
2008/8/6 Robin H. Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hi folks, Sorry that it's taken this long to get completed, but the Jeeves replacement, Willikins, is finally 99% done, and ready to join lots of channels. Great work guys. Please send the bot to: #gentoo-doc (I'll be the contact for now since neysx is on vacation) #gentoo-docs-pl (it's mine) Thanks in advance and kind regards, Lukasz Damentko
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Council Reminder for August 7
2008/8/1 Donnie Berkholz [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On 23:17 Thu 31 Jul , Donnie Berkholz wrote: If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. I know at least one person has already submitted an agenda item. Please do so again here along with a brief summary, so we can get them all in one place. I waste a lot of time digging through lists looking for requested agenda items, and I could be spending it making Gentoo better instead. -- Thanks, Donnie Donnie Berkholz Developer, Gentoo Linux Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com Fair enough. Let me wrap up the IRC part. 1. I'd like to ask Council to discuss possible reactions to our developer being banned from Freenode without providing us with a reason. The situation looks like one of Freenode staffers overreacted over something Chris said during previous Council meeting and banned him to prevent him from attending next meetings when he was supposed to provide more information on the CoC topic. The ban was removed after an hour, but they still refuse to provide us with reasons for it which looks like (mostly because we weren't shown any sane justification for the ban) a cover up operation. It would be good if Council officially protested against that ban and demanded a detailed explanation from Freenode staff. 2. I want Council to consider moving their meetings somewhere where third parties can't control who in Gentoo can attend and who can't. Like our own small and created just for this purpose IRC server. A situation when a third party may disallow our developer from attending a meeting without even telling us why isn't the healthiest one. We should be independent from such decisions of third parties so they can't politically influence Council decisions by removing people who are inconvenient for them. Now when it (most probably) happened once, we have no other choice but to believe it's possible it will happen again. 3. I want Council to consider creating and using irc.gentoo.org alias instead of irc.freenode.net in our docs, news items and so on. The alias would allow us to move out of the network more easily should we ever decide to do so. Debian did exactly the same a couple of months ago prior to them moving out to OFTC (http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060604) so maybe it would be a good idea to have this for Gentoo too. Infra (Shyam Mani) say it isn't a problem at all to create and maintain it, we in fact already have something like this pointing at Freenode, it would be just a question of updating that alias and updating our docs with it. It would increase our independence from Freenode and make future network switching much easier should we ever decide it's time to part our ways with our current IRC service provider. The intention behind all three items is to increase our independence from our IRC service provider. Kind regards, Lukasz Damentko
