On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 10:33 AM, Pacho Ramos <pa...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Was reviewing http://dev.gentoo.org/devaway/ and I have seen there are a
> lot of obsolete messages. Could you take a look and verify don't have an
> old .away file in your homes ;) ?

Might not hurt to generally consider the usefulness of .away messages
in general.  If you have one and it doesn't really convey anything
useful, then it might as well not be there.

If Gentoo is something you only sporadically work at, and you plan on
being that way for years, and you carefully control your
responsibilities accordingly, I'm not sure it is necessary to
advertise the fact.

If you normally have one level of availability, and it is going to be
different for some reasonable period of time, then it is useful so
that people know what is going on.

Useful messages:
"I'm on vacation until Feb 8th - check with other team members in the meantime."
"Just started a new job - bear with me while I hand off
responsibilities / get back on my feet in a few weeks."

Less useful message:
"My job comes first - will not have much time for Gentoo for the next
30 years but I'll do what I can."

If things are changing .away is a great tool.  If things are going to
impact your level of Gentoo contribution for a long time the best
thing to do is to just change your level of involvement to suit.
Probably not good to be the project lead for Chromium if you can only
look for updates twice a year, and so on.  If you maintain three
packages and do the odd arch test and your teammates generally know
that, no real need to advertise - just watch for bug emails and
comment on anything that looks urgent...

Rich

Reply via email to