On Tue, 03 Aug 2010 11:27:00 +0100, James wrote:
On 08/02/2010 01:41 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:31:22 +0100, James wrote:
>
>> Remember that some packages get very little activity because they need
>> very little.
>
> And these are not a problem at all.
>
>> Increasing someone's AWOLness counter because they didn't for example,
>> update ed is just plain silly.
>
> [snipped the rest here]
>
> Uh, come on, ... that's not helpful. There are ideas how to detect absent
> maintainers early by collecting and *combining* information available in
> the Fedora intrastructure. Not by having a single old stable pkg trigger
> an AWOL alarm.
> [snip]
Really? So imagine this scenario.
Packager foo has two packages, bar and baz.
bar is a package much like ed, which needs very little attention, and
goes for a year without anything needing doing to it, no koji activity
happens.
I also own at least one such package.
This increases the hidden little "AWOLness" counter.
foo then goes on holiday for a week, and forgets to mention this on his
fp.o page.
A bug is found in package baz. Bug reports are filed - users are
impatient. It's noticed that foo has a very high AWOLness counter due
to foo's other package.
He is surprised to learn that he's been declared AWOL and had his
packages removed when he returns from holiday.
As I read the initial proposal, this is entirely plausible.
No. The packages won't be removed. That's not the goal.
It could be, however, that another contributor becomes a co-maintainer
and applies a fix while you are on vacation. And that's a good thing,
provided that the fix is fine. You would return from vacation to learn
that your precious users have not been interrupted for more than a few
days by an unexpected bug. In case it's a show-stopper bug, it could
be that a helpful provenpackager jumps in to apply a fix _even without_
any new AWOL-detection procedure (but provenpackagers are not supposed
to take care of unmaintained packages).
Apart from that, your scenario is overly negative. Sort of a worst-case
assumption. It could be that there is a threshold of N bugs that would
need to be reached before a script would even consider taking a closer
look at some person. More typical are packages, where the packager has
dozens of open tickets, which have not been touched at all in several
weeks/months. They are in a poor state already before someone notices
that the packager seems to be missing.