RFC: monitoring maintainers' vacations
Many of us send a mail when going off-line for some time. This is
however quite informal: these anouncements are posted once in -devel,
once in -private; mainly there is no automated way of tracking them.
Most of the time I try to keep this in mind when I feel I may need to
contact the author of the message, but I usually don't keep these. I
think most of the time, people expecting an answer can't know in
advance they'll need to contact someone, and its a pain to do a
search, except if we store these messages manually.
What would be nice is a mechanism which would allow us to tell the
periods when we're expecting to be totally offline, or have a sparse
connectivity, or ...
This would allow for:
* special action to be taken on bug reports; let's say that if a bug
is granted important severity or higher while the BTS is aware of the
maintainer being offline, it can issue a call for a non-maintainer fix
* some warning mail can be sent to senders of messages to
packages.debian.org in these cases
* etc... Add your ideas here if any
It could be done as a mail server, say vacation@debian.org, which
would accept messages like the following examples, maybe only if
they're pgp-signed (by the involved maintainer ? by any maintainer ?
Issue slightly different messages when "put on vacation by another" ?)
====Examples
OFFLINE [ TOTALLY | PARTIALLY ] dirson@debian.org [FROM <date>] [TILL <date>]
====
It could accept queries from the same address:
====
STATUS dirson@debian.org [AT <date>]
STATUS ALL AT <date>
====
This proposal is probably not fully optimal; I may have overlooked
some interesting possibilities.
Any comments ?
--
Yann Dirson <ydirson@mygale.org> | Stop making M$-Bill richer & richer,
isp-email: <ydirson@a2points.com> | support Debian GNU/Linux:
debian-email: <dirson@debian.org> | more powerful, more stable !
http://www.mygale.org/~ydirson/ | Check <http://www.debian.org/>
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