Bug#264769: Provide QA advice and tables for WNPP cleanup work

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

Package: qa.debian.org
Severity: wishlist

A necessary QA task is occasional cleanup of stale WNPP information.
The most important tasks are to do something about very old and
non-current ITA and ITP records, because these may inhibit people from
volunteering for tasks that still need to be done.  So it is important
to clear out non-current ITA and ITP information.

Suggested advice, as a state diagram:

ITA is less than thirty days old, or activity has been seen on the
package in the last fourteen days: do nothing.

ITA is more than thirty days old, no activity on the package has been
seen for fourteen days, but no QA query has been sent:
   Send a QA query asking the maintainer if they still intend to adopt
   the package, asking if there is anything you can do to help.
   Remind them (if appropriate) that they can adopt the package and
   fix bugs later; there is no need to delay adoption until they have
   fixed all the bugs.

ITA is more than thirty days old, no activity on the package has been
seen for fourteen days, and a QA query was sent more than thirty days
ago without any response, or with a generic (and as yet unfulfilled)
promise to upload soon:
   Revert the package to O or RFA status.  (See below.)

ITP: Follow the same procedure, except increase "thirty days" to
"ninety days", and increase "fourteen days" to "thirty days".  If the
ITPer times out, then 

How to turn a package to O status:
   Retitle the WNPP bug; send an explanatory email to the ITAer and
   remind them that they can always ITA again when they are ready to
   adopt the package.

How to turn a package to RFA status:
   Do the same thing as above, but also coordinate with the previous
   maintainer to make sure they are willing to continue to maintain
   the package until a real adoption comes in.

Rationale: Completing an ITA is a trivial procedure.  No need for long
timelines.  But an ITP may take Real Work, so we should allow
considerable, but non-infinite, delay.

One wrinkle I do not know how to address: non-maintainers can ITA/ITP,
in the hopes of finding a sponsor for their packages.  But sponsors
are in short supply.  So you get the case of someone who may really
have a package ready, and can't upload it.  In such a case, it would
be nice to really help the person find a sponsor (or volunteer
yourself!) but regardless, the above procedure should not be followed.

Now, what would really help this out would be:

A web page, linked to from qa.debian.org, which gives the suggested
procedure to follow.  If this is going to happen, I am happy to write
suitable text.

Also a web page or pages which give up-to-date information on which
packages are in which categories, culled from the BTS.  At least, the
page could have a list of ITA and ITP packages, sorted by the age of
the ITA or ITP (which can be found by looking for the most recent
retitling of the bug).  I am not a wizard in writing this kind of
thing, but the lack of it need not delay the previous.

Thomas