Repository cleanup occurs after the primary owner of a subversion repository becomes inactive.
The primary owner of a subversion repository is generally the person who created the repository and is limited to faculty, staff and students. The primary owner of any repository can be changed at any time by submitting a support ticket to help@rice.edu asking for the ownership to be changed.
When an individual who is the primary owner of a repository leaves the University the resources and data for which they had access needs to be dealt with. In the case of subversion repositories, this data needs to be removed or another suitable owner needs to be found.
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.
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.
In the first step of processing, the repository's /rice_config folder will be checked out and parsed to determine the owners, and possibly alternate owners, of the repository. The information learned will be stored in a database for reference later.
The repository's status will be changed from it's normal state of READY to NOTIFY and an email will be sent to all active