Re: [gentoo-dev] Time based retirements

[Markos Chandras]

On 21 December 2012 08:49, Brian Dolbec <dolsen@g.o> wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-12-20 at 21:30 -0800, "Paweł Hajdan, Jr." wrote:
>> On 12/20/12 7:21 PM, Doug Goldstein wrote:
>> > I'm curious who had the brain dead idea to retire Gentoo developers
>> > that are still interested in the distro, that maintain low activity
>> > packages for herds that are stretched way too thin, and are still
>> > contributing to the distro in many ways other than direct CVS commits
>> > (e.g. overlays, user support, providing hardware to other devs, etc).
>>
>> Dough, thank you for rising the issue.
>>
>> I'm receiving the undertakers@ e-mail, so I have a pretty good view of
>> what's happening.
>>
>> I have several suggestions how we can improve things:
>>
>> 1. 3 months is too short period anyway.
>>
>> 2. Think through what the goals are. We do not want to retire as many
>> people as possible. We do not want to frustrate people who do contribute
>> to Gentoo. We do not want to discourage people who consider becoming new
>> developers. At least I don't.
>>
>> 3. I think what's important is to keep packages maintained. I consider
>> maintainership to be a duty, not a privilege. If someone is listed in
>> metadata.xml, but is not really maintaining the package, that creates a
>> formal illusion that the package is maintained, and may prevent other
>> people from stepping up and taking maintenance of that package.
>>
>> 4. I suggest that we focus on the above: keeping packages maintained.
>> Taking packages out of hands of inactive/overworked maintainers is good.
>> They can always become _more_ active, which is easier if they retain cvs
>> access. If they make a single commit every 3-6 months, I'm fine with
>> that as long as things are maintained properly.
>>
>> 5. Remember that cvs/bugzilla activity is not the only way of
>> contributing. It's probably most tanglible and very needed, but let's
>> not reduce real people and their real world situations, and their effort
>> to contribute to just dates and numbers.
>>
>> Paweł
>>
>>
>
> +1
>
>   Even though I am a relatively new developer, I too got an email
> stating my inactivity (not from undertakers@).  My main purpose for
> becoming a dev was not for ebuild work, but more for coding.  Three
> months is way too short to be making that type of list.
>
> For all those young devs out there still in college/university.  You
> will find that time accelerates as you age.  3 months may seem a long
> time for you now, but give it another 5-10 years and you'll discover
> that 3 months can go by quite quickly.  Especially with a family (wife,
> kids, pets) and a full time job.
>
> --
> Brian Dolbec <dolsen@g.o>

Nobody said the policy is correct. I face the same problems so the
policy might not be appropriate anymore. However, I totally disagree
with
the way Doug started this thread. Calling us "brain dead" ? No sorry,
I am not willing to discuss anything about this policy nor willing to
change it if someone can't behave properly and ask us nicely to
discuss the problem. We never *insulted* or *threated*  anyone with
retirement, we are extremely polite and we just ask for status updates
in order to clean up metadata, reassign bugs and look for new
maintainers of unattended packages. Nobody ever complained in the
past, and all of them were willing to drop themselves from metadata
without problems. But I never expected this attitude just for asking
"hey are you there? do you still want to maintain all these packages?
any ETA on coming back". Seriously...

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2