Project:Infrastructure/Developer away notification
The Gentoo infrastructure project provides a notification service (AKA devaway) for alerting developers and community members when a developer is unavailable.
The notification is controlled by an ~/.away file that is manually created and removed at the beginning and end of the unavailability period. The content of the file should be a string of text with no line breaks. An automatically generated, UTC/Zulu timestamp will be displayed at the end of the message. The timestamp is based off file modification time (visible using ls -lc and updatable using touch).
This service is hooked in to unavailable developers page on www.g.o (updated every 15 minutes) and the special devaway page on dev.g.o.
Usage
Creating the .away file
The following steps are also documented on dev.g.o/devaway.
woodpecker $
touch ~/.away # Updates the timestamp on the file to the current time
woodpecker $
echo "I'll be away until Aug 14, contact $dev1 or $dev2 in my absence. I will return Aug 30." > ~/.away
The file of course can be modified using standard text editors.
Removing the file
After the away period has ended, be sure to remove the file:
woodpecker $
rm ~/.away
Limitations
Line breaks
The away message content should not contain line breaks (newline) characters. When a line break character is encountered it will signal the end of the away message and concatenate the rest of the message.
See also
- Project:ComRel#Leaves_of_Absence
- Project:Infrastructure/Developer webspace — documents how a Gentoo developer can configure their personal webspace on our development cluster.