Re: having public irc logs?

[u <u@451f.org>]

Hi!

Gianfranco Costamagna:
>>> I didn't suggest that, but privacy online is seriously something that
>>> *doesn't* exist, and people not understanding that are simply wrong.

I completely agree with Wouter. Well said.

>> Your argument that some information on IRC might be useful does hold
>> some merit, however, but then going from there to "let's publically
>> archive all IRC channels" is overdoing it, IMO. Instead, I would suggest
>> that one of the following is done:
>>
>> - Encourage people to not make information public exclusively on IRC.
>>  Debian does mailinglists as its primary mode of communication, so
>>  everything that really matters is done on mailinglists.

Ack.

>> - If some team prefers to use IRC over mailinglists, then rather than
>>  going "let's make everything public because there might be something
>>  useful in there, see xyz", just make those team's channels be public.

> I don't think I ever requested to have everything public, as said many
> times, 3-4 channes should be enough.
> I might add #-mentors, where a lot of nice packaging stuff is said,
> and should probably made available to google search engine
> (as -mentors mail list does).
> 
> Newcomers questions/answers are a great value for other people facing
> same issues, would be nice to not loose all the answers there.

I think that your idea to make such information public is praiseworthy.

However, are raw logs really the right way to do so? IMO, the signal to
noise ratio is much too low (see links provided by pabs) and it would be
a better idea to work on improving the Debian wiki pages instead. This
would also allow for a constant and collective improvement of such
information.

Debian certainly lacks such documentation, but it's definitely not by
throwing all kinds of unordered textual data into a search engine that
we will improve this situation on the long term. (Let alone privacy
concerns.)

I think we|you|me|everybody should instead sit down one afternoon and
get important information out of our brains or IRC channels into a human
readable format on the Debian wiki. That would be a true service and
help get more people to contribute to Debian.

Cheers,
ulrike