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The role of debian-private



Hello,

there is a discussion in debian-private about the role of
debian-private. There is nothing private in that discussion, so I'm
following it up here.

So, some people are advocating in favour of a private mailing list for
DD chatter. The fact that that idea is being very vocally pushed by no
less than two people prompts me to double check some fundamental facts
about the Debian project.

So, here's how, so far, I understand things are supposed to work.

We have a social contract: http://www.debian.org/social_contract where
we say: "We will not hide problems". This is generally taken to mean
that as much as possible of Debian work and discussion ought to be
public.

That idea is violated, institutionally, in at least two points:

 - embargoed security issues, in order to be able to participate in
   vendor-sec;
 - and debian-private, which is supposed to host discussion about
   sensitive topics, with the understanding that private discussion
   should be kept to a minimum and moved to public lists as soon as it's
   possible to do so.

My understanding is that the intention of the project is to keep these
violations to as little as one possibly can, and this intention has also
been reflected in the results of this GR: http://www.debian.org/vote/2005/vote_002

I used to take all of this as something obvious and well understood
throughout the project. So, if someone thinks that those assumptions are
wrong, I'd like to hear their reasons.


Ciao,

Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org>

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