Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements

[Jeremy Olexa]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Doug Goldstein <cardoe@g.o> 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