On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Lukasz Damentko <r...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Okay, let me explain in detail. > > Undertakers contact devs who didn't touch CVS for at least two months, > are considered inactive in the bugzilla and have no current .away set. > > After the initial contact, something like 3/4 of e-mailed people > respond very quickly and explain why they are gone (usually family and > work trouble, weddings, army service, health issues, moving out/in and > so on, so called real life) and in such cases we do not retire them > but let them resolve whatever trouble they are in and return to the > project afterwards. > > There are dozens of devs in the project who had such a conversation > with me or other undertakers and all can confirm retirement was > abandoned right away after they gave valid reasons for their absence > and the only consequence was poking about missing .away and asking > when they are planning to get back to work. > > Those people wouldn't even be contacted if their .aways stated why > they are gone and for how long. Therefore a REMINDER: Please do set > your .away. Thanks. > > The rest are usually people who already gave up on the project, just > for various reasons didn't say bye yet. They often have no commits for > many months despite undertakers poking them a bunch of times. Half a > year period without even touching CVS and bugs isn't that uncommon for > them. I can give you specific examples if you really want some. I'd > prefer to avoid pointing fingers at people though. > > Those folks either say goodbye to everyone after being contacted by us > or do not respond at all, in which case, if we get no response to our > two e-mails and an open retirement bug from them after more than a > month, we consider them missing in action and go on with their > retirement. If they appear suddenly at any point of this procedure and > say they want to stay, we either abandon retirement completely or only > send them to recruiters to redo their quizzes if their absence was > extremely long. > > I don't think how we can proceed differently in above kinds of > situations. Do you suggest we stopped e-mailing people who seem gone > from the project (how would we find out those who are really gone > then?), stopped retiring people who mail -dev/-core and say goodbye or > stopped retiring people who aren't responding to their mail and bugs > named "Retire: Person's Name" for months? > > There's only one controversial group of inactive devs: > > There are some people who would prefer to stay in the project although > they can't really give a good reason what for. Usually they claim they > belong to a number of projects although they don't put any regular > work into any of them and leads of this projects often haven't even > heard there's such a person on board. They sometimes were members of > this projects years ago, sometimes wanted to be members and sometimes > only imagine they are members of them. I can give specific examples if > you insist. > > Those we try to encourage to find a new job within Gentoo and often > they do. I can name one who yesterday did start his new Gentoo work > after years of slacking. :-) > > They are the smallest group of those we contact and process, I could > maybe name 5 or 6 of those currently in Gentoo and that's it. There's > no pending retirement of such a person currently. > > Really. Situation you name, when someone wanted to stay in Gentoo > despite not doing any actual work and got retired happened once or > maybe twice during the last year out of about a hundred retirements we > have processed. And all were extreme cases of close to zero activity > over many years with no promise of it ever increasing. We consider > those very carefully, they are always consulted with devrel lead. This > kind of decision isn't made lightly I can assure you. > > Finally, if someone really wants to be a dev but got retired, he can > return to Gentoo within couple of weeks by reopening his retirement > bug, submitting quizzes to recruiters and waiting to get useradded. > Recruiters process returning devs extremely fast so returning to > Gentoo if someone really wants to isn't a problem at all. And there's > absolutely no way anyone from undertakers could stop someone from > being recruited again. > > So summarising, the situation you're complaining about is extremely > marginal. You are invited to subscribe to retirement@ alias and read > its logs on bugzilla and see for yourself how rare occurrence it is. > > I hope I explained everything completely. I'm happy to take questions > if you have any, and of course am open to suggestions. > > Kind regards, > > Lukasz Damentko > > Granted the people I've recently talked to about this or the people I remember bringing this issue up in the past had this happen to them before we had this firm policy in place so really you're addressing a lot of the issues. But the whole act of making them go through all the hoops as a brand new developer is somewhat put off-ish to people wanting to come back. I honestly can't think of one developer that's come back and hasn't been up in arms about being made to go through all the hoops of a new developer.
