Attached is a proposal for dealing with MIA maintainers. Read, Relax, Enjoy......
At Nils' suggestion, I am posting my proposed guidelines for dealing with the MIA maintainer problem. There are a number of grey areas - particularly the length of time someone does respond to email and has not uploaded. These should be determined by the members of The Project and published everywhere they can be before they go into effect. Here goes... Proposed protocol for dealing with MIA maintainers: 1. Set and publish on in the Developer's documentation exactly what is considered a minimum of activity for a developer. 2. Have someone attempt to contact the developer before they are listed as MIA. Give the developer some time to respond. 3. Packages maintained by developers who cannot be contacted, or don't respond within the alloted time should be listed as orphaned, and available. 4. Developers who are listed as MIA for some period of time should be removed from the project (accounts either deactivated, or deleted) MIA status should be removed if the developer meets the activity requirements. Suggested time / minimum activity guidelines: Package upload once in 4 months or Active on Debian lists / IRC channels in last 3 months. How long do you wait to hear back from a suspected MIA developer? (3-4 weeks to allow for those long vacations away from the net.) New developers are treated the same as any other developer. Developers listed as MIA for 6 months should be given a final email notifying them that they *must* respond by a specific date (4 weeks from date of email). If they don't respond by that date, their developer accounts should be deactivated, and 90 days later deleted. NMUs for packages should *always* be done if the person who can do the NMU gets no response from the developer in a reasonable amount of time (depends on the severity of the problem). Reasonable reply times for NMU: Security issues: immediate response ( < 24 hours ) RC bugs: 2 or 3 days when we are within 2 monthis of release less as release date gets closer "normal" bugs: 2 to 3 weeks (?) Reply means the maintainer responded to your query, not that they have an upload ready to go (although for security issues I would hope they would soon). I know my proposal will take some time to do. Since I opened my big mouth, I'm willing to run such an effort. My only condition is that any such system be voted on by the developers and accepted *before* being implemented. Pat -- ======================================================================= Patrick Ouellette Amateur Radio: KB8PYM mobile/portable 9 (somewhere in 9 land) Debian Linux Developer (as time and family permit) Human? (the jury is still out on this one) ======================================================================= GPG Fingerprint: 8577 CFA7 B984 8E58 0D00 79B6 CFDA 9D82 06A7 376E
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