3.2.4. Going on vacation gracefully

It is common for developers to have periods of absence, whether those are planned vacations or simply being buried in other work. The important thing to notice is that other developers need to know that you’re on vacation so that they can do whatever is needed if a problem occurs with your packages or other duties in the project.

Usually this means that other developers are allowed to NMU (see Non-Maintainer Uploads (NMUs)) your package if a big problem (release critical bug, security update, etc.) occurs while you’re on vacation. Sometimes it’s nothing as critical as that, but it’s still appropriate to let others know that you’re unavailable.

In order to inform the other developers, there are two things that you should do. First send a mail to debian-private@lists.debian.org with [VAC] prepended to the subject of your message 1 and state the period of time when you will be on vacation. You can also give some special instructions on what to do if a problem occurs.

The other thing to do is to mark yourself as on vacation in the The Developers Database (this information is only accessible to Debian developers). Don’t forget to remove the on vacation flag when you come back!

Ideally, you should sign up at the GPG coordination pages when booking a holiday and check if anyone there is looking for signing. This is especially important when people go to exotic places where we don’t have any developers yet but where there are people who are interested in applying.