Bits from the Accounts Team

No, you have not reached Planet Debian, this is really Planet GNOME.

Some people have been asking what is going on with accounts creation for GNOME CVS and shell access recently, as requests are taking much longer than usual to be resolved or even responded to. While I don’t believe our average response time during the last weeks has been at all bad, compared with other projects and such, it’s certainly bad for GNOME standards, so here goes a short explanation.

Basically, our Accounts Team has people enough to handle all the requests very quickly in normal conditions and give people their accounts within 48 hours after the request, including verification, confirmation and everything else. When a couple of these brave people can’t work on GNOME account management for any reason, the rest of the team can still cope and do the same procedures within a week. However, we are obviously not prepared to have ALL of the members away at the same time, and that is what struck us some weeks ago. 😉

Today I took the last of my school exams for this bimester, which have lasted exactly two weeks, period in which I haven’t done almost any work on accounts processing at all. Hopefully, I’ll have been able to clear the backlog by the end of the weekend, so please don’t panic 🙂

Speaking about panic, these delays have been making people ask about the status of their requests a bit too frequently. I am preparing a guide, and going to post it here and on devel-announce-list when it’s ready and all, but as a quick summary: if you’re considering a ping, think twice before you do it.

We use our Request Tracker and nothing else for account requests exactly so that they do not get lost. If you have received the automatic reply saying your ticket has been filed, you can be sure it will be processed when its time in the queue arrives. Tickets are not rejected, resolved or in any way closed without the requestors being notified and if there is something wrong with your request, I assure we are going to mail you back to ask some questions. Requests do not ever get thrown into /dev/null, and asking about their status only wastes time from the Accounts Team with replying stating it is just the normal delay, merging duplicate tickets that are created more often than not, etc.

And finally, after a little talk with pbor on #gnome-hackers this morning, I thought some information about our mysterious and obscure queue might help accomplish what I have just asked. So, if it interests you, enjoy:

www.gnome.org/~gpastore/accounts.html

Patches for facelifts are welcome, as usual 😉