Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements

[Petteri Räty]

Doug Goldstein wrote:
> 
> Granted the people I've recently talked to about this or the people I
> remember bringing this issue up in the past had this happen to them
> before we had this firm policy in place so really you're addressing a
> lot of the issues.
> 
> But the whole act of making them go through all the hoops as a brand new
> developer is somewhat put off-ish to people wanting to come back. I
> honestly can't think of one developer that's come back and hasn't been
> up in arms about being made to go through all the hoops of a new developer.

The quizzes haven't changed that radically in the last couple of year.
Personally I wouldn't want people who have been inactive for ages to
just start committing as their information is more quite likely
outdated. Doesn't the fact that they complain about having to do work to
answer the quizzes prove this?

Regards,
Petteri



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Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements

[Doug Goldstein]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Lukasz Damentko  wrote:

> 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
>
>
Granted the people I've recently talked to about this or the people I
remember bringing this issue up in the past had this happen to them before
we had this firm policy in place so really you're addressing a lot of the
issues.

But the whole act of making them go through all the hoops as a brand new
developer is s

Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements

[Doug Goldstein]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Jeremy Olexa  wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Doug Goldstein  wrote:
> > I'm wondering what exactly is the harm in letting developers idle for a
> > while? While they might not be actively committing they are still
> > knowledgeable people that are just as capable as everyone else to push in
> a
> > fix for small packages. There's lots of bugs in bugzilla with items that
> > just need someone active to commit them. There's even a lot of these
> items
> > are filed by retired Gentoo developers who could have easily pushed this
> fix
> > for all users. The fact that someone only does one commit a year does not
> > marginalize their contribution. While it may be small it is improving the
> > overall quality of the distro. I'm constantly seeing developers getting
> > upset over getting pushed out.
>
> The problem comes when $idle_dev has XX bugs assigned to them and they
> don't get resolved and no one else knows that there are issues. Then
> users get the attitude that they shouldn't even file bugs because no
> one fixes them and they just sit there.
>
> So, I agree with you as long as $idle_dev doesn't pretend to maintain
> packages and the team that they belong to doesn't consist of people of
> the same activity level. (rendering the team useless too).
>
> 2 cents,
> -Jeremy
>
>
So let's re-assign the bugs to m-needed and not nuke the person.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements

[Lukasz Damentko]

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] Developer Retirements

[Gordon Malm]

On Monday, March 9, 2009 11:44:55 Doug Goldstein wrote:
> I'm wondering what exactly is the harm in letting developers idle for a
> while? While they might not be actively committing they are still
> knowledgeable people that are just as capable as everyone else to push in a
> fix for small packages. There's lots of bugs in bugzilla with items that
> just need someone active to commit them. There's even a lot of these items
> are filed by retired Gentoo developers who could have easily pushed this
> fix for all users. The fact that someone only does one commit a year does
> not marginalize their contribution. While it may be small it is improving
> the overall quality of the distro. I'm constantly seeing developers getting
> upset over getting pushed out.
>
> What we really need is not a smaller, leaner development force. But a
> leadership team that's smaller and more effective and willing to take
> charge to get something done. I'm hoping that we can get away from the 6
> month GLEP process and towards something more streamlined.
>
> --
> Doug Goldstein


It is possible that maybe we've been too forceful in retiring people who still 
wish to contribute.  Sometimes it appears that way from the outside.  But as 
I am not on that team, I don't really know and therefore will not attempt to 
pass judgement on their processes.  From what I have seen and understand they 
do try to make contact multiple times to understand the situation before 
retiring anyone.

There is an important security aspect to retiring folks - commit abilities.  
Perhaps in the case a dev wants to contribute but cannot in the near future 
their commit privs can just be revoked until such time they ask for them to 
be turned back on?  I guess that would be an 'extended devaway' ?

Gordon Malm (gengor)

Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements

[Peter Alfredsen]

On Mon, 9 Mar 2009 13:44:55 -0500
Doug Goldstein  wrote:

> I'm wondering what exactly is the harm in letting developers idle for
> a while?

Nothing, as long as they don't pretend to be maintaining packages while
they idle. See compnerd and his tonne of system-packages for reference.
It unnecessarily complicates things if people just "step out" for half a
year and don't leave an .away or re-assign their packages.

> The fact that someone only
> does one commit a year does not marginalize their contribution. While
> it may be small it is improving the overall quality of the distro.
> I'm constantly seeing developers getting upset over getting pushed
> out.

They are not being pushed out. One commit a month is not much to ask.
That's one speeling fix per month to be considered an active dev.

If they can't be bothered to do that, well, I really feel for them, but
they should just hand over their keys and submit their yearly commit as
a patch instead. They're even welcome to CC me, citing this thread and
my promise to commit their patch and I shall do it.

Problem solved.

/loki_val

Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements

[Jeremy Olexa]

Marijn Schouten (hkBst) wrote:


As opposed to those same bugs being assigned to maintainer-needed and getting
lots of attention?



The inactive dev can just as easily resolve a m-needed bug as one that 
is assigned to himself. The added benefit that some people actually look 
at the m-needed queue on rainy days. (me, patrick, loki_val, etc).


-Jeremy

Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements

[Marijn Schouten (hkBst)]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Jeremy Olexa wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Doug Goldstein  wrote:
>> I'm wondering what exactly is the harm in letting developers idle for a
>> while? While they might not be actively committing they are still
>> knowledgeable people that are just as capable as everyone else to push in a
>> fix for small packages. There's lots of bugs in bugzilla with items that
>> just need someone active to commit them. There's even a lot of these items
>> are filed by retired Gentoo developers who could have easily pushed this fix
>> for all users. The fact that someone only does one commit a year does not
>> marginalize their contribution. While it may be small it is improving the
>> overall quality of the distro. I'm constantly seeing developers getting
>> upset over getting pushed out.
> 
> The problem comes when $idle_dev has XX bugs assigned to them and they
> don't get resolved and no one else knows that there are issues. 

As opposed to those same bugs being assigned to maintainer-needed and getting
lots of attention?

Marijn

- --
Sarcasm puts the iron in irony, cynicism the steel.

Marijn Schouten (hkBst), Gentoo Lisp project, Gentoo ML
, #gentoo-{lisp,ml} on FreeNode
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements

[Jeremy Olexa]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Doug Goldstein  wrote:
> I'm wondering what exactly is the harm in letting developers idle for a
> while? While they might not be actively committing they are still
> knowledgeable people that are just as capable as everyone else to push in a
> fix for small packages. There's lots of bugs in bugzilla with items that
> just need someone active to commit them. There's even a lot of these items
> are filed by retired Gentoo developers who could have easily pushed this fix
> for all users. The fact that someone only does one commit a year does not
> marginalize their contribution. While it may be small it is improving the
> overall quality of the distro. I'm constantly seeing developers getting
> upset over getting pushed out.

The problem comes when $idle_dev has XX bugs assigned to them and they
don't get resolved and no one else knows that there are issues. Then
users get the attitude that they shouldn't even file bugs because no
one fixes them and they just sit there.

So, I agree with you as long as $idle_dev doesn't pretend to maintain
packages and the team that they belong to doesn't consist of people of
the same activity level. (rendering the team useless too).

2 cents,
-Jeremy

[gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements

[Doug Goldstein]

I'm wondering what exactly is the harm in letting developers idle for a
while? While they might not be actively committing they are still
knowledgeable people that are just as capable as everyone else to push in a
fix for small packages. There's lots of bugs in bugzilla with items that
just need someone active to commit them. There's even a lot of these items
are filed by retired Gentoo developers who could have easily pushed this fix
for all users. The fact that someone only does one commit a year does not
marginalize their contribution. While it may be small it is improving the
overall quality of the distro. I'm constantly seeing developers getting
upset over getting pushed out.

What we really need is not a smaller, leaner development force. But a
leadership team that's smaller and more effective and willing to take charge
to get something done. I'm hoping that we can get away from the 6 month GLEP
process and towards something more streamlined.

--
Doug Goldstein