Re: Doing something about "should remain private forever" emails
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 05:44:50PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Raphael Geissert writes ("Doing something about "should remain private forever" emails"):
> > So everyone knows that the declassification of -private isn't going
> > to happen any time soon.
>
> I think the declassification GR was unwise. The outcome is
> predictable. I think it would be best to explicitly revert it.
> The kind of fine-grained tagging and control envisaged by the GR is
> far too much work.
I suggest to simplify things. For example, delete all messages sent to
debian-private automatically after 365 days. Then we have some kind of
guarantee that after 365 days the messages remain private forever. Any DD
wishing to keep the messages for a longer time, can still copy them from the
Debian server to their own private system. (Even that can be automated, so no
manual work for anyone.) I've read some rather private things on
debian-private without any clause "should remain private forever", so I prefer
to keep the messages private by default.
> But as a practical matter, I think that the bigger problem is that we
> are sometimes discussing things on -private which ought to be in
> public.
I don't see this as a big problem at all. The person starting a thread on
debian-private usually had good reasons to do that. It's when the thread
becomes big with the discussed topic shifting away fromt he original topic,
people don't always realize they are still posting to debian-private. The
silliest thing to do at that point is complain about "this should be in
public". Anyone can simply start a new thread on a public mailing list without
complaining. The traffic on debian-private is also not a problem for me. I
subscribed to debian-private for a long time now, and it's not difficult for me
to skip threads I'm not interested in. Messages sent to the wrong lists
happens all the time, also on the public mailing lists. Let's accept some
noise, while allowing anyone to choose where they post their messages. There's
sufficient social control encouraging people to use the better list.
Regards,
Bart Martens
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