Re: [gentoo-project] How do you feel about non-contributing developers with commit access?

[M. J. Everitt]

On 02/11/18 16:22, Matthew Thode wrote:
> On 18-11-02 16:05:35, Michał Górny wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> The Undertakers team has frequently received various forms of
>> 'criticism' of their effort in attempting to find and retire inactive
>> developers.  This is getting as far as to claim that we shouldn't retire
>> anyone because there are no limits on commit slots.
>>
>> Therefore, I would like to ask the wider community a general question:
>> how do you feel about preserving commit access for people who no longer
>> actively commit to Gentoo?  I'm talking about extreme cases, say,
>> no commits to any user-visible repository for over a year.
>>
> I'm not sure the exact time, but I think it shouldn't be user-visable,
> but 'Gentoo' that should ben what's looked at.
>
> As far as changing the developer to a non-committing developer, what
> happens if they want to come back?  Would they need to retake the quiz,
> re-find a mentor/recruiter, etc?
>
I have long felt that an automated 'devaway' process would actually be
beneficial to Gentoo and other devs, etc, as it would be an easy way to see
if someone was 'active' and accessible; whereas the existing one depends
very much on someone talking on IRC, making commits, answering bugzilla or
github requests or bikeshedding on the mailing lists. Devaway isn't
properly used (in my experience) simply because people forget to set it. Or
its ambiguous because someone sets it, and continues some form of visible
activity with it set.

The reason I say automated, as everybody would be independently held to the
exact same standards uniformly, and whilst there are likely to be some
exceptions, these are probably better use of human 'labour' than doing the
whole job by hand. Also, there would be less confusion because it would be
possible to write a policy/procedure for the 'bot'/automation, and emails
could even be sent out automatically even, to warn potential candidates.

I would also advocate a reduced "dev-refresher" "course" which the
recruiters administer, which is a short form of the quizzes structure,
simply to revisit some of the important salient topics, and any relevant
updates in policy and practice which they might have missed in their absence.

This shouldn't be an onerous procedure to implement, and should greatly aid
the work of the retirement team to best use their limited resources to best
effect; even if that means working around the tooling to make it efficient
and effective to them.