Working with Teams

Purpose of Teams

Distro Tracker teams have been designed to make it easier to collaborate on a set of related packages. Members of the team receive the email messages of all the packages that have been added to the team.

Team Email Address

Each team has an associated email address of the form team+identifier@distro-tracker-domain. This email address can be used to discuss between all team members.

It is possible to opt-out from those emails by disabling the contact keyword at the team level (see Managing Subscriptions to Teams).

This email address can also be used in the Maintainer field of Debian packages. By doing this, you ensure that your team’s packages are automatically added to the Distro Tracker team and that all members get the associated messages.

Team Packages Overview

Each team provides synoptic views of all packages monitored by the team. They are directly accessible from the team’s main page: https://distro-tracker-domain/teams/team-identifier/

Creating a Team

On the List of teams page (https://distro-tracker-domain/teams/) you have to click on the Create a new team button to display the team creation form where you have to fill the following fields:

Name (required)

This is the public name of your team.

Identifier (required)

This is the short-name of your team that is used in the URL and in the associated email address. A proposal is made based on the team’s name, but you should think twice before blindly accepting it because you don’t want to change it later as this would break URLs and email addresses.

Visible in the list of teams and free to join by anyone

This checkbox defines if the list is public (default value) or private. A public list is visible in the list of teams and can be joined by anyone. A private list is not visible in the list of teams and only the team owner can invite members to the team.

Description (optional)

Long description displayed on the team webpage.

Url (optional)

A public URL displayed on the team’s page for anyone who wants to learn more about the team.

Maintainer email (optional)

An alternate email address that will be looked for in Maintainers and Uploaders fields when scanning the packages. Any package with this maintainer email will be automatically added to the team.

Note

The user who created the team will be the team’s owner. He’s the only user who can update the team parameters. Changing the team’s owner is not currently supported, if you have to do this, you will have to ask the site administrator to make the change for you.

Joining a Team

On the website

On each team page (https://distro-tracker-domain/teams/team-identifier/) you will find a Join button. If you are authenticated, it will immediately add you to the team and show you a Leave button that you can use to revert the operation. If you are not authenticated, it will invite you to login first to be able to complete the operation.

If you have have multiple emails associated to your account, the subscription process will ask you to select the email address that will receive the notifications.

With the mailbot

To join a team through email, you will have to send an email to control@distro-tracker-domain containing the command join-team team-identifier either in the subject or in the body of the mail. This will subscribe the email address that you used to send the message. You can ask for the subscription of another email address by using the command join-team team-identifier email.

The mailbot will send back a confimation mail to the email address being subscribed. The message will contain a confirmation command that the user must send back to the mailbot. A simple reply is usually enough for this as the mailbot is smart enough to detect the command even when it’s quoted in the reply.

Note

The team identifier to use is the same identifier that is used in the URL of the team on the website.

Adding and Removing Packages

All team members can add or remove packages through the management page available when you click on the Manage team button on the team’s main page.

Adding and Removing Members

Only the team owner can remove arbitrary members from the team. He can also add new members to the team although their mail subscription will be muted by default until they confirm their membership.

Any member (except the owner) can leave the team by clicking on the Leave button on the team’s main page.

Managing Subscriptions to Teams

Every user will see the list of teams he’s part of on his profile, on the Subscriptions page available at https://distro-tracker-domain/accounts/subscriptions/.

By expanding the team entry, one can see whether team-specific keywords have been configured. Those keywords are used to filter messages that the user will get through the team. They can be modified by clicking on the Modify keywords button.

If the user doesn’t want to leave the team but wants to stop receiving email messages for the team, he can mute the team by clicking on the Mute button. The reverse is then done by clicking on the Unmute button that replaced it.

If the user is not (equally) interested in all packages from the team, he can click on the Manage subscriptions button and have a list of all packages with the possibility to:

• mute/unmute individual packages;

• select different keywords for each package.