Re: having public irc logs?
Mehdi Dogguy dijo [Sat, Apr 08, 2017 at 09:47:38AM +0200]:
> To be honest, I also wondered why IRC channels were not logged when I
> started contributing to Debian. Later, I understood that people used
> IRC to communicate like they would do in real life. As such, we will
> not try to record every conversation held between two contributors.
I'm surprised nobody has said so far something along the following
lines, which I feel to be quite obvious.
Our goals by archiving our communications via mailing lists is not
"just" to prove everything we do is done in public. A mailing list
message is usually a self-sustaining piece of information, even as a
part of a conversation. They are easy to situate, and our usual
practices (i.e. inline quoting, preserving threading, the way we
handle Cc and Reply-to, etc.) help make each bit of information
meaningful and indexable.
IRC is just a shouting room. OK, sometimes it's way quieter, but each
channel just a stream of messages that hold very little "state" - If
you try to reconstruct what was said in an IRC conversation, if
anything, you will have the destinatary of some lines (as we hold the
convention of starting a line with <nickname><colon>).
IRC is great for live communication, but is a very very lousy
referential or citational material. Of course, that's one of the main
drivers behind bots such as Meetbot, which organizes what is said
during a specific interval by adding topicality and salient points. Of
course, Meetbot logs are publicly accessible.
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