Project:Retirement

The Developer Relations Undertakers project handles developer retirement, both when developers announce their retirement as well as due to developer inactivity.

Sending mail
Whenever sending mail on behalf of Undertakers, please remember to:
 * CC
 * set Reply-To to

If you forget to do that or the user skips the alias in his reply, please forward the mail to the alias for archiving purposes.

Steps to retire a developer

 * 1) Check commit activity:
 * You can rely on https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/log/ to easily check for recent activity.
 * Additionally we have the "slacker" report mails from Infra team to  every month
 * Check https://bugs.gentoo.org/custom_userhistory.cgi?matchstr=DEVELOPER@gentoo.org to see the last few Bugzilla activities. Activity is defined very broadly in this case so commenting, changing resolution, CC'ing etc. all count as activity. You need to look at each of those bugs to decide if the activity is related to development.


 * 1) If the developer is inactive for more than two months, send him the First Mail asking him to consider removing himself from packages that he is not interested to maintain anymore. Those packages should be announced as unmaintained to the   mailing list and re-assigned to maintainer-needed@gentoo.org until another developer or proxy-maintainer steps up and take care of them. After two weeks of no response consider reassignment of the packages. Then search for the New Developer bug, if the developer predates recruitment bugs (there was no recruitment bug), open a new bug. Change   to Packages reassignment: Full Name (nickname) (Status update: Full Name (nickname) for staff members) . Reassign the bug to   (Retirement Admin) and change   to first-mail-sent: yy-mm-dd . Make sure the developer and relevant teams are CC'ed on the bug. Set Alias bug field to nickname. Once situation is clarified, close the bug as FIXED. Remember to reassign bugs to new maintainer after changing metadata.xml maintainer field.
 * 2) After four months from the first e-mail, if you still believe the developer is inactive, reopen the Packages reassignment bug. Change   to Retire: Full Name (nickname) and change   to second-mail-sent: yy-mm-dd . Send him the Second Mail and wait a minimum of one month, to give the developer adequate time to respond on the bug or to the mail. If you get no response during that period, send the Third Mail . Don't forget to change Status Whiteboard to third-mail-sent and to update the date there. Wait another month.
 * 3) Close the bug if the developer is still considered active
 * 4) If the developer doesn't respond within six months since the first mail or is otherwise still considered inactive, state that on the bug and ask Infra to start retirement process ). Bug changes add CC   and make sure you change the   to.
 * 5) Retirement procedure looks like this:
 * Clean up any  the developer in question might be mentioned in. Using simple python script.
 * Remove him from all the teams he is still a member of: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Gentoo and set developer status to
 * Search for all NEW and REOPEN bugs assigned to the retired developer on Gentoo Bugzilla and reassign them to herds or projects the package belongs to. Information to whom reassign can be obtained from file of that package.
 * Wait for Infrastructure, Planet and Forums admins to retire developer in question before proceeding further.
 * Remove access to  (access is either removed completely or changed to voice depending on whether they ask for it or they're still considered active and helpful in the channel). Ask a freenode staffer (#gentoo-groupcontacts channel) to reset the cloak to a non-gentoo one.


 * 1) Close the bug once all of the above steps are finished!

Status tracking for retirement bugs
Pending: - Packages reassignment - Bugs - IRC cloak - Infra - Wiki - Forum - Planet

Pending retirements
Click here to see all the pending retirements.

What will happen with your mail address after retiring?
Your mail will be forwarded to the non-gentoo email address on file in LDAP, for a period of one month per year as developer, rounded up, min 1 month, max 6 months.

If no non-gentoo email address is on file, or the address on file bounces, your mail may be stored or discarded for up to the same time, at the discretion of infra.