Automating the NonResponsiveMaintainers policy

[Al Dunsmuir]

On Friday, March 2, 2012, 4:21:13 PM, Jóhann wrote:
> Some people seem to be confusing this like this would instantly take
> effect which is not the case here.

> We are just talking about automating the "NonResponsiveMaintainers 
> policy" as is so instead of an reporter to manually perform these steps
> ( which they can perform at any time now btw ) those steps would be 
> automated...

It really _is_ quite different.

The  trigger for NonResponsiveMaintainers now is an actual person with
a  real  problem  that  they  need  solving.   People  understand this
trigger.

An automated trigger has to be something substantial, a tuned heuristic
based   on   actual   outstanding bugs in specific states.  Triggering
too often, or without clear justification will result in the automated
emails being ignored as spam.

Triggering  the process purely based on lack of activity is one of the
cases  that  isn't  reasonable. The maintainer's packages could all be
very  mature,  and  need no rebuilding and infrequent updates (because
upstream only releases every couple of years).