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 [EMAIL PROTECTED], 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 ] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [FROM <date>] [TILL <date>] ==== It could accept queries from the same address: ==== STATUS [EMAIL PROTECTED] [AT <date>] STATUS ALL AT <date> ==== This proposal is probably not fully optimal; I may have overlooked some interesting possibilities. Any comments ? -- Yann Dirson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Stop making M$-Bill richer & richer, isp-email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | support Debian GNU/Linux: debian-email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | more powerful, more stable ! http://www.mygale.org/~ydirson/ | Check <http://www.debian.org/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]