[gentoo-dev] Re: Improve devaway system

[Duncan]

Mike Frysinger posted on Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:03:21 -0400 as excerpted:

> On Monday, August 30, 2010 10:14:48 Markos Chandras wrote:
>> It seems to me that people paying less and less attention to devaway
>> system[1]. As you may see yourselves, few of the entries are 2-3 year
>> old. This either means that these devs are inactive since then or that
>> they came back and just didn't bother updating their status.

>> I think that a simple script that will search all the devaway messages
>> and collect those that are >60-90 days is not that difficult to get
>> implemented. Does anybody have a better approach to deal with this?
>
> i'd extend the spec a little so that the dev can declare their expected
> return time and have the script ignore entries before that date
>
> perhaps say "the very last line should be just the date in YYYY-MM-DD
> format"

Indeed.  In some countries, and we've had more than one dev that this has 
affected, there's mandatory military service for a year.

In the US there's not a mandatory thing, but many volunteer for the 
reserves or national guard and they've been called into rotation in both 
Iraq and Afghanistan.  That's 2-3 years, AFAIK, and while folks 
volunteering now surely know and expect they might be in rotation, a lot 
of those in at the time those wars started, didn't.

Now some may wish to retire before that, as they don't know what they'll 
be doing afterward.  Others may have definite plans for Gentoo afterward 
as well, and I think an extended "leave of absence" should be allowed for 
that sort of thing, at least for a year.  2-3 years... a lot happens in 
that time.  People change.  Plans change.  Gentoo/Linux/FLOSS changes.  
For those longer stints, perhaps a retirement and re-recruitment is 
appropriate.  But I don't think a year out should mandate it, and I guess 
it'd depend a lot on the person and their plans, if it's longer than that.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
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