Re: [gentoo-dev] About obsolete/useless devaway messages

[Pacho Ramos]

El sáb, 28-01-2012 a las 10:57 -0500, Rich Freeman escribió:
> On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 10:33 AM, Pacho Ramos <pacho@g.o> wrote:
> > Was reviewing http://dev.gentoo.org/devaway/ and I have seen there are a
> > lot of obsolete messages. Could you take a look and verify don't have an
> > old .away file in your homes ;) ?
>
> Might not hurt to generally consider the usefulness of .away messages
> in general.  If you have one and it doesn't really convey anything
> useful, then it might as well not be there.
>
> If Gentoo is something you only sporadically work at, and you plan on
> being that way for years, and you carefully control your
> responsibilities accordingly, I'm not sure it is necessary to
> advertise the fact.
>
> If you normally have one level of availability, and it is going to be
> different for some reasonable period of time, then it is useful so
> that people know what is going on.
>
> Useful messages:
> "I'm on vacation until Feb 8th - check with other team members in the meantime."
> "Just started a new job - bear with me while I hand off
> responsibilities / get back on my feet in a few weeks."
>
> Less useful message:
> "My job comes first - will not have much time for Gentoo for the next
> 30 years but I'll do what I can."
>
> If things are changing .away is a great tool.  If things are going to
> impact your level of Gentoo contribution for a long time the best
> thing to do is to just change your level of involvement to suit.
> Probably not good to be the project lead for Chromium if you can only
> look for updates twice a year, and so on.  If you maintain three
> packages and do the odd arch test and your teammates generally know
> that, no real need to advertise - just watch for bug emails and
> comment on anything that looks urgent...
>
> Rich
>
>

I fully agree, personally, I think we should tend to only have messages
informing about an important change in our involvement with Gentoo and
the cases when we expect to not be able to commit anything for a few
months but will return after that.

Also looks important to me that, when going to contribute less on
maintainership, people should try to find new maintainers or
co-maintainers for their packages if possible (sending a mail to
gentoo-dev for example)