Fedora clean up process seems to be seriously broken...

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 11/22/2011 10:18 AM, Stanislav Ochotnicky wrote:
> Excerpts from "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"'s message of Tue Nov 22 00:28:32 +0100 2011:
>> On 11/21/2011 11:21 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
>>> On 11/21/2011 10:50 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>>>> I understand this thread as a comment on improving the detection of
>>>> inactive maintainers and unmaintained packages.
>>> It is indeed intended as such.
>>>
>> BTW does anyone have any insight on how other distributions are solving
>> this Debian/Suse/Gentoo/Arch etc. since we are all faced with this
>> problem and surely some distribution might have solved this problem already.
> Well Gentoo has a different approach to ownership and all that. And
> from that also a different approach to slacking/activity.
>
> Basic thing considered is commits/month[1]. If that seems low over
> prolonger period of time other sources of contribution for given
> developer are being searched for. Usually his/hers team leads are
> being asked if he/she does some thing out of our cvs tree. It can be
> answering questions on forum or other activities. We don't really have
> different "levels" of developers (think maintainer vs. qa
> vs. provenpackager etc).

Hum

I think the only way to achieve something like this for maintainership 
we need to drop the ownership module so either nobody owns a 
package/component in the project or relevant SIG owns the package.

>
> All in all this is semi-automated process. Tools gather data, produce
> statistics and few people look at them and from time to time try to
> ping people. Though the whole approach is mostly: "If you can help at
> least a bit, don't leave". Plus there is the whole devaway[2] system
> so people can be inactive for prolonged periods of time and other devs
> know what to do (oh, you say you are away on long vacation until end
> of December and others are welcome to fix bugs in your packages. Cool).
>
> I am sure something similar could be done in Fedora. If the packager
> hasn't made any commit in any of his packages in past 2 releases +
> some other conditions maybe, it's likely he has no idea about current
> guidelines, processes, has never used fedpkg etc.

If I can recall correctly I think fesco had someone working on something 
to gather activity stats ( wiki/bugzilla ) dont know if that ever got 
finished nor can I recall if the results from that tool if it came to 
existence were made public anyway if that tool exist the result from it 
should be made public from my pov.

In general gather statistic is an area all groups/communities within the 
project needs improvements in atleast I know for a fact that we have had 
the tendency in the past within the QA group to implement some idea 
without at the same time be measuring what the outcome of the idea is 
hence we have not been able to measure if things are improving or 
actually getting worse.

Afaik I dont think we can even give measurements on our own sub 
community's health as simple as are we gaining members more than we are 
loosing them and I suspect that we are not alone in that regard.

JBG