MIA Team
Introduction
MIA means "Missing in Action" and is a group of people and scripts which help to track inactive people in Debian. The MIA Team is responsible to orphan outdated packages if the maintainer is not responsive. We also help the people to find solutions like finding a Co-Maintainer and so on. According to this information a "MIA Person" is someone who has packages in Debian and maybe is even an official Debian developer but was quite inactive for a while and let his package become out of shape. Someone is considered as a "MIA person" as soon as someone reported this person and an entry in the DB has been created.
The MIA Scripts
On the host qa.debian.org you can find several scripts in /org/qa.debian.org/mia. The most important tool is "mia-query" where you can see the history from the person, which packages he/she maintains and the last-activity.
Fixed ping-intervals
During the QA meeting we decided the following intervals:
- First contact (tag: nice).
- After _wait 15 days_, send the same mail again in case that it was lost. (tag: nice).
- After _wait 15 days again_, send another mail where you mention something like orphaning, this is the most important step and _the maintainer has 30 days to reply_ to the e-mail (tag: prod).
- Send another mail where you tell the inactive person that you _will orphan the packages in exactly 15 days_ if we don't hear anything from the person (tag: last-warning).
- After _15 days more_, orphan all the packages and send another mail. (tag: inactive).
- Finally, _after 90 days_ send the person a "Good-Bye" mail and set the tag "needs-wat", the DAM will then care about this people. (This step is for DDs and DMs only)
(All those mails *must* be signed)
There are templates for those mails at qa.debian.org/MIATeam/Templates. Improvements are welcome.
Team maintenance
If one package of the person is maintained in a team, at the step where we send the prod-mail we file a Bug of severity "serious" against the package, requesting that the person is being removed from the Uploaders/Maintainers-field. At the point where we orphan the packages, and the person isn't removed from those fields, we just make an NMU to enforce this.
Don't forget to set these usertags:
User: mia@qa.debian.org Usertags: mia-teammaint
How to get involved
We still do not want to make MIA-Data publically available since it contains private information. As before, normal maintainers can send a mail to mia@qa.debian.org , asking if a person is MIA and we will then reply to you or ping the person. If you're a DD and want to get involved - please write a mail to mia@qa.debian.org , we still search people who have time to help. Please also see qa.debian.org:/org/qa.debian.org/mia/README. Please also see Debian Developer's Reference's Dealing with inactive and/or unreachable maintainers
mia-tracker
Mario Iseli wrote a tool called "mia-tracker" which is now also installed on the qa.debian.org-host and it has been added to the SVN. It makes possible to add a field like this to the ping-mails:
X-MIA-Tracker: 20071230 mario@debian.org
This means that a notification will sent to the address on 20071230, so you can easily track the periods. Please note that this script isn't really tested well until now, but it will be documented soon in the README file and tested.