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

[Raymond Jennings]

I stand by what I said.

Before revoking commit access, first make sure that their absence is
not actively obstructing development, like if their maintainership is
occupying packages in need of attention that they aren't looking after
and which can't be tampered with by others without infringing on that
maintainership.  Check to see if there's outstanding bugs against the
packages.

Then simply email them as stipulated in undertaking procedures.

Personally, I think that revocation of commit access and retirement
should be considered two distinct processes.

Commit access can be revoked and restored with a little bit of
administration, and if a developer is inactive for a lengthy period of
time, whether they make use of devaway or not, they should have their
commit access temporarily revoked just on grounds of security
principles.  Dormant accounts are potentially vulnerable to being
hijacked.  This is where the developer's responses (or lack thereof)
to activity probing emails should come in handy.

Actual retirement though in my opinion should be reserved for cases
where their absence is actively harming development, for example by
having their absentee maintainership of a package or whatnot obstruct
maintenance or bugfixing or development or what have you.

In my opinion the last thing gentoo needs is to make it harder for
people to contribute.

My two cents.

On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 3:22 PM Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 11:05 AM Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> 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.
>
>
> So I think the problems are not about commit slots (I think that is a poor way to think about it.) I think the problems we have seen are around developers who lose interest in various areas of the tree.
>
>  - Herds / Projects that list N people, but really only have 1-2 active developers. Sometimes the herd / project has no active developers.
>  - Metadata.xml that lists N people, but really only have 1-2 active maintainers. Sometimes the package has no active developers.
>
> The result of the above are essentially:
>  - Work on a given area of the tree has to wait some time while the existing (inactive) maintainer is pinged.
>  - A given area of the tree may look well covered (e.g. package has many maintainers listed) when in fact this is untrue and none of the maintainers are active. This leads to developers possibly ignoring that portion of the tree.
>
> To me, retiring 'inactive' developers is really done to address these issues. If inactive developers are removed from maintainer lists from time to time, we get a better signal on what packages are actively maintained, vs packages that need more support.
>
> I don't have any particular problem with people who maintain only a few packages; they may not commit often but as long as they care for the packages assigned to them I think they still bring value. The trick is differentiating between these people and inactive people. This is one reason why we always email people; there is an expectation that active developers respond to email and inactive developers do not. It seems to have served us well thus far.
>
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Best regards,
>> Michał Górny