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Some repositories are for the individual owners only. They are the only ones with access to the repositories and when they leave, their repositories will be removed. It will still take the full 8 weeks for the repository to be deleted but no one will receive notifications since the primary owner is inactive and there are no other alternate owners defined.
Some repositories are shared resources where many people have access and several people maintain it. In this case, a new owner for the repository needs to be found since the function of the repository is greater than the individual that owned it. In shared repositories, we see the concept of alternate owners. These are individuals who, while not the primary owner of the repository, are listed with privileges in the access_file to be able to make full changes to the repository by having WRITE access to the /rice_config folder. It is from this list of alternate owners that we will try to find the next primary owner of the repository.
So, let's discuss what happens during the repository cleanup process.
Every Sunday, a process will run that looks for any repositories where the primary owner has become inactive. Any repositories that are found in this state, will be processed further.
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