Debian MIA structure
On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 10:22:24AM -0800, Chuan-kai Lin wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 02:26:48PM +0100, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
> > Secondly, yes, I've been informed that there was not many acitivity
> > lately, but didn't yet follow up. I'll do so soon.
> > If you want to privately notify someone about suspected inactivity,
> > you can do so via mia@qa.debian.org.
>
> Could you explain these two bits? (No, this is a serious question.) I
> was following Section 7.4 of the developer's reference, and private
> notification of suspected inactivity through mia@qa.debian.org is not
> listed anywhere in that section. Contacting QA is supposed to be the
> final step after you have looked at his packages, inquired on -devel and
> such to make sure that the developer is indeed missing.
>
> What happens after a message is sent to mia@qa.debian.org? You
> mentioned that you will follow up soon, and what is your (or QA's) role
> in this procedure?
I realize these things are quite obscure (still). The obscurity is not
intentional, just lack of time to properly document things. I'll give
quick summary here, and will try to get things properly documented
after I've given a talk about Quality Assurance in the FOSDEM Debian
developers room next month in Brussel, and discussed this with some more
people.
mia@qa.debian.org is an email alias for the people maintaining and
acting upon the MIA database[1], a collections of mail exchanges with DD
and non-DD maintainers that have in any way raised suspection of
inactivity (in a significant number of cases, this suspection later
turns out to be wrong). The 'open' cases are continuously processed
whenever communication was a certain time ago, and then mostly mails are
sent to the maintainer in question. If after repeated mails someone
doesn't reply, all their packages get orphaned, otherwise, if a reply is
sent, there is acted upon, in a number of cases, maintainers agree to
orphan some or all of their packages, for example.
This deals with lots of maintainers, and recall the google-reason I
cited in my previous mail. There are of course 'false positives' or just
inquiries about time-committment concerns, sometimes really private
issues are involved (for example, sickness, family situation, ...).
Because of these reasons, mia-mails are not really suited for public
discussion, and therefore held private. I try to ask
sponsors/co-maintainers and other related people around a maintainer,
usually, but choose not to ask on -devel.
> And finally, are there plans to update the Developer's Reference to
> reflect this change in standard procedure?
Yes, while this procedure hasn't really been discussed much, it's now
just de-facto how it happens. After FOSDEM I will work with the
Developer's Reference maintainer(s) to get the documentation updated.
Thanks,
--Jeroen
[1] Previously almost exclusively Martin Michlmayr, now pretty much
exclusively done by myself, although having a few more people would
be nice
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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