On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 11:05 AM Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
Hello,

The Undertakers team has frequently received various forms of
'criticism' of their effort in attempting to find and retire inactive
developers.  This is getting as far as to claim that we shouldn't retire
anyone because there are no limits on commit slots.

So I think the problems are not about commit slots (I think that is a poor way to think about it.) I think the problems we have seen are around developers who lose interest in various areas of the tree.

 - Herds / Projects that list N people, but really only have 1-2 active developers. Sometimes the herd / project has no active developers.
 - Metadata.xml that lists N people, but really only have 1-2 active maintainers. Sometimes the package has no active developers.

The result of the above are essentially:
 - Work on a given area of the tree has to wait some time while the existing (inactive) maintainer is pinged.
 - A given area of the tree may look well covered (e.g. package has many maintainers listed) when in fact this is untrue and none of the maintainers are active. This leads to developers possibly ignoring that portion of the tree.

To me, retiring 'inactive' developers is really done to address these issues. If inactive developers are removed from maintainer lists from time to time, we get a better signal on what packages are actively maintained, vs packages that need more support.

I don't have any particular problem with people who maintain only a few packages; they may not commit often but as long as they care for the packages assigned to them I think they still bring value. The trick is differentiating between these people and inactive people. This is one reason why we always email people; there is an expectation that active developers respond to email and inactive developers do not. It seems to have served us well thus far.
 

Therefore, I would like to ask the wider community a general question:
how do you feel about preserving commit access for people who no longer
actively commit to Gentoo?  I'm talking about extreme cases, say,
no commits to any user-visible repository for over a year.

--
Best regards,
Michał Górny