First off, great work! Now I can remove the retirement item off my old "todo" list. [1]
On Tue, 13 May 2003, James Troup wrote: > On the 12th March I sent out a maintainer ping to 191 possibly > inactive Debian developers. The list of developers was generated by > looking first at all maintainers who didn't have a source package > signed by (one of) their key(s) in unstable and then excluding from > that anyone who had been seen (with a signed message) by echelon in > the last 6 months. > "echelon" in this context meaning the mailing lists? As described in http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2000/debian-project-200001/msg00007.html ? A second ping to unresponsive and bounces might be nice in case of mailer problems. If a second ping is done it should probably be done before changing account status. It should probably say the results of the last ping and what will happen to their account. > So to actually do anything about these MIA folks, some decisions had > to be made about what to do with them WRT LDAP, their accounts etc. > > There will be 4 states for any given account in LDAP: > > o [default] > o Emeritus > o Disabled > o Memorial > > The 'emeritus' state is for people who voluntarily retire. Their > accounts are locked and their keys are moved to a separate keyring. > Their email will continue to work for 6 months[a]. They lose vote, > upload and -private reading privileges. > What happens to email going to 'emeritus' status Debian accounts after 6 months? Bounce? > The 'disabled' state is for people who don't respond to maintainer > pings, their email bounces, or whatever - basically someone who's MIA. > Things are the same as 'emeritus', except their email won't continue > to work. After a year in this state the accounts will be purged[b] and > will be available for reuse. > I would encourage the bounced e-mail to say they are MIA. I'd also like to see a canonical location to store MIA names and information (I.e. a web page). What happened to the qa MIA database? The code's at http://cvs.debian.org/mia/?cvsroot=qa but I can't find anything online. I dislike having their accounts being available for reuse. It could cause confusion. I could give many examples of potential confusion. > People in 'emeritus' or even 'disabled' can come back at anytime > without going through new-maintainer; provided they can prove they > control the key(s) associated with the account. > But not nicely if their account gets reused. This could cause even more confusion. > The 'memorial' is a special state used for accounts that are disabled > but which we don't want reused to avoid confusion (at best), e.g. with > developers who've passed away. > What happens to e-mail going to these accounts? memorial bounce messages may be nice... I guess a bounce of any kind would be appropriate. > So, the 34 people who's email bounced and 90 people who didn't reply > will have their account set to the 'disabled' status. The 28 people > who asked to be retired will be set to 'emeritus'. If you know how to > reach any of the people listed in [1] and [2] below, please feel free > to contact them and get them to reply to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Are does 'emeritus' status last for 6 months only? If not, other retired developers may be considered for 'emeritus' status. If so, what does their account status switch to? removed? > Finally, this is only the start of what will hopefully be an ongoing > process; further pings based on other criteria are planned and also > the results of Martin's MIA work will be acted on. > Automation deciding when to send a ping, sending a ping message, informing everyone of the results... would be great. Regular cleanups like this one would be good too. > [b] Any files associated with the account will be either removed or > moved to some holding area. > Some guidelines to determine which or when account files are archived/removed may prevent future squabbles. Thanks for your efforts. [1] My old "todo" list is at http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2002/debian-user-200207/msg04836.html but I have newer lists on local systems with items removed, changed and added. Drew Daniels
