martin f krafft wrote:
also sprach Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> [2005.03.11.0158 +0100]:I can't see any way of having polite reminders work without some sort of statement from the DPL or the listmasters, probably with the prospect of some sort of enforcement, though, personally.And I can't see how enforcement will fly within a project such as Debian.
Ah, well, that's resolvable.The debian-release list enforcement policy of politely asking people to stay on topic has worked quite well and hasn't needed any augmentation. See, for instance:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2004/06/msg00071.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2005/01/msg00036.htmlThe "get 0-day NMUs right" enforcement policy of preventing people who get it wrong from doing any more NMUs for a while was enforced once, and didn't need to be enforced again. Javier dealt with the issue with pretty good grace.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/08/msg01625.htmlEnforcement of the BTS policy gets a few more flames because it only happens when people are already being argumentative, and because it's not a policy people are very well aware of in advance. OTOH, an argument doesn't stop the policy being effective -- for instance the debate over Enrico's suspension didn't stop Bug#224742 from being properly closed, which was the point of the policy.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=224742 http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/12/msg01966.htmlOne of the elements which does help mitigate the negative effects of enforcing these policies is having somewhere to redirect the discussion to; in the cases above, that was -devel. That makes cleaning up -devel a little harder, of course, since there's no obvious answer to the question of where people can have offensive/off-topic/whatever discussions instead. I expect it'll probably be necessary to have a "debian-lists" list of some sort to take care of (civil) discussion of how the lists are/should be managed; and I expect the question of what we should encourage for uncivil discussion will be a difficult one. Some of the options I can think of are "just blog about it", or "blog about it, but don't syndicate it to Planet Debian", or "complain on IRC instead", or "have a debian-flames list, that's moderated, and only accepts *really* good, vicious, hurtful flames".
(I figure, if you're getting flamed on a moderated list with high standards for flamage, you can at least console yourself with the knowledge that you've made it into the big leagues...)
I've no idea which of those would be best, or if there're other ideas that'd be better.
Cheers, aj