Tobias Frost wrote: > Activity data is certainly useful to assess where work has happened. The > question from the MIA perspective is slightly different: once a person > has been determined inactive, how do we obtain a reliable and complete > list of packages that may require follow-up action because of that > person’s involvement? > > Do you have some concrete query in mind that you could share with me, > which would tell (quickly and with accuracy) that someone stopped > working on a package and we need to tell someone, e.g a team? What other > resources do you think could help?
I haven't a concrete query, but it seems to me that you can't expect to obtain that list *from packages only*. Generally speaking, a person is involved in maintaining a package if: 1) that person is explicitly listed as either Maintainer or Uploader; or 2) the package is team-maintained *and* that person is a member of that team. In the second case, querying the package can tell you what the team is, but can't tell you who its members are. Trying to solve that by (ab)using the Uploader field is the wrong approach, because it singles out individual members of the team as "the persons responsible for the package". That may not reflect the way the team actually works, goes against the very concept of team-maintainership, and doesn't actually solve the problem, because if a team member goes MIA who wasn't listed as uploader, this package wouldn't appear in the "reliable and complete list" that you're aiming at. The right solution is to have a canonical place within the project where the list of members of every team is stored and kept up-to-date. It is definitely not duplicating that information in every package. I don't know whether that already exists. Gerardo
