Mailing lists and confidentiality
Manoj Srivastava sent me private email to complain about my posting
about the Deity discussion to debian-devel, claiming that I had
violated the privacy of the debian-private mailing list.
You'll notice if you read my two messages that I didn't quote any
actual text that was written on debian-private (just as I'm not
quoting Manoj now), so the only question remaining about any possible
breach of confidentiality is whether I revealed something that was
intended to be secret, and if so whether it was reasonable for that
information to be kept secret.
Information that I revealed included
* that the Deity project is having some schedule problems;
* that there is a flamewar about it in debian-private, and in
particular
* that I feel Bruce has been heavy-handed in his management of the
situation.
None of these pieces of information are or ought to be secret.
As I said in my previous mail, I would be much happier if we were to
wash our dirty linen in public rather than behind closed doors.
As far as I'm concerned there is no reason for the discussion to be
occurring on debian-private rather than debian-devel.
I agree that lack of context for people reading debian-devel is a
problem, but I don't have time to summarise the discussion on
debian-private, and reposting the articles is clearly not on.
Dave Cinege suggests that the debian-dissent list would be a more
appropriate place for part of this discussion. This probably stems
partially from a lack of knowledge about the subject matter of the
discussion, but I think that using debian-dissent even for the
arguments about management practices would not be a very good idea.
debian-dissent is not a core Debian mailing list, and I don't feel
that the issues I'm talking about are ones that dissidents would
primarily be interested in. Also, debian-dissent has not IMO had a
very good quality record; there has been a lot of random abuse and
general unhelpfulness. The last thing I want is for a fairly minor
dispute about management style and a particular software project to be
taken over by revolutionaries :-).
Ian.
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