Why discussions don't move from debian-private

[Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org>]

Someone complained about a lengthy off-topic discussion taking place on 
debian-private, and suggested to move it to a public mailing list.

Russ replied:

* Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>, 2014-04-16, 11:09:
> This sort of message is completely unhelpful, even though I know you're 
> trying to be helpful.  I think it's coming out of a misunderstanding of 
> why threads do not move from debian-private once they start here.
>
> What I believe you're missing is that when you harangue individuals in 
> this fashion to send their messages elsewhere, what you're actually 
> asking them to do is to do a substantial amount of work to try to 
> summarize the thread to date so that their message would make sense 
> without all of that context in order to move the thread elsewhere.  
> Most participants in the thread are not going to have either the time 
> or the inclination to attempt to do that.  (I feel a great deal of 
> gratitude to the small number of people who have been willing to do 
> that work in the past.)
>
> Therefore, when you repeatedly say things like this, you're not 
> actually helping move the thread in any productive way, even though 
> that's doubtless your intention.  Rather, the effect is to get people 
> to stop having the discussion *entirely*.  Moving the thread is too 
> much work, continuing the thread results in angry mail saying it 
> shouldn't be on -private, and the easiest thing to do is to just stop 
> talking completely. I made an intentional decision to ignore your 
> previous message and keep talking about it here because I think the 
> conversation is worthwhile and I didn't want to stop the conversation 
> completely.  I don't have time to move the thread properly (which would 
> take at least five times as long as writing this message is taking, 
> quite possibly more).
>
> If someone (such as yourself, since you feel strongly about this -- 
> *hint*) wants to move the thread somewhere public, I would be happy to 
> continue it there.  You probably feel like you don't have time to do 
> the work to move the thread properly, which is why you resorted to the 
> much easier and faster approach of sending this message here.  Please 
> consider that everyone else participating in the thread probably feels 
> the same way you do, and have not moved the thread to a public forum 
> for exactly the same reason that you haven't done so.
>
> Everything here is public, if anyone wants to move *this* discussion to 
> a public forum.

Done!

--
Jakub Wilk