Re: Standard form for poking maintainers?
On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 03:07:49PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> So there's a fair number of maintainers who need polite pokes regarding
> their packages (before declaring them MIA and orphaning/removing
> packages). However, I am not known for my tact.
>
> So I wondered if anyone had devised a semi-standard "form letter" for
> contacting maintainers and saying "Please don't leave your package like
> this: maintain it, orphan it, or remove it" while also making it clear
> that this is not an attack on their character and that we appreciate
> them and are sure they are doing their best.
I'm doing this as part of the process currently known as MIA -- also if
a maintainer isn't completely missing, but just (apparantly) lacking
time for (some of) their packages. For that I do use a small library of
standard paragraphs to include in those pings, so that I don't get too
short when dealing with a lot of these. The 'secret' of such form
paragraphs is though, that it isn't recogniseable as such, and also
tailored to the recipient's packages etc. Because all outgoing and
incoming mail for the MIA process is stored centrally, one can easily
prevent the same person getting the same form letter (instead, after
first contact, I typically just reply to the last mail).
So, the answer is 'no', there is no such form-letter library publicly
available (ttbomk). If you're concerned about your own tone (if only
more people in and around Debian would be a bit more insightful on
their own tone...) when mailing people, you're encouraged to mail
mia@qa.debian.org instead hinting about that particular maintainer.
I'm not sure whether some easy to use templates for others would be a
good thing to have, because if this type of pinging isn't coordinated
to some level, it might, regardless of the way it's written, piss off
people unneeded.
--Jeroen
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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