Re: removing permissions for long unused accounts, take 2

[Simon Josefsson]

Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> writes:

> Therefore I would now like to actually do it.

Thanks for working on this, it is important!

Maybe I am getting old, but one year seems like a fairly short period of
time.  The list would be shortened with the following names if we used
two years:

    Daiki Ueno
    Dmitry V. Levin
    Eric Blake
    Siddhesh Poyarekar

So not radically different actually.  It would be bad if this excercise
lead to less contributions.

How about using the one-year time frame, but give the person 6 months of
time after an email notifying them about this situation to make another
contribution and thus stay as committer?

> So, the list of people (to notify per mail and to remove from the
> membership list on savannah) are the following:

It would be nice to explain the reason for doing this, so nobody takes
offence.  If I lost write permission to a project without a clear
justification that clearly doing so was for the benefit of the project,
I could feel that it was personal and feel offended.  It could be brief,
just a paragraph or two.  It could be part of the GNU maintainers
manual, to recommend once every year prune the list of people who have
write access to a project if they didn't use it.  Maybe an email would
be a way to get people back into contributing?  Having clear policies
helps everyone and usually reduces friction.  How about this:

  Hi.  We have seen that you haven't used your write access to the
  gnulib project within one year, and we miss you!  To improve
  robustness against supply-chain attacks, and thus increase our
  trustworthyness, we believe write permissions should be restricted to
  those that use it regulary.  This is more of a request that you come
  back than a good bye!  If the write permission has not been used by
  you within 6 months, we will remove it -- but as a previous
  contributor, re-establishing write permissions should be a smooth
  process whenever you are ready to contribute again!

/Simon

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