Re: request
...
> If you could explain the nature of these emails and why you would
> not want them archived, perhaps you would get a sympathetic hearing.
Yes, of course. We are friends.
We are talking about written words, carrying the name of the author.
These written words are being archived, indexed and re-published.
The legal owner of copyrighted material (as any author is, unless a
legal transfer has occurred) is the only legally-entitled distributor
of any such material. By subscribing to a mailing list, a person is
pretty far from transfering the copyrights of any posted material.
Mailing lists (non-commercial, as Debian is) are in fact a forum of
friends. Archiving, indexing and allowing re-publication of this
material by other sites is now going *well beyond* the mere posting
of an email to a list of friends.
> ... spend several hours tracking down this material (including any
> quotations thereof by other people) and I'm not entirely certain
> that's a good use of our time ...
I agree. I propose a very simple solution: to archive and index
emails as usual, as far as the date of these emails is no older than
six (6) months. This is also in line with the need for our mailing
lists to allow other friends to benefit from our local discussions.
This is also beneficial in term of resources, as it avoids
web-engines to overload our servers by reading gigabytes of
text... Let me also repeat that the information on those messages is
obsolete, as there is no gain in a 1999 message on a piece of code
that no longer exists! For example, what is the gain with the kernel
mailing list to still post my old email on DVD-RAM? That code is now
in the kernel, in a very different form, and there is no single
person on earth that would care retrieving that old message. So, why
is that Excite and AltaVista and friends keep having a link to that
message? I tell you why: because that message is still there on the
net, Excite is scanning the net for useful pages, the net is full of
garbage, so Excite etc are now listing a lot of garbage. Talking
about time, how long does it take searching between 17789323223
entries of such garbage to find a good recent page?
I am sure that by archiving and indexing 6 months old messages only,
all of the above problems will disappear overnight. Did we ever do
spring cleaning? And if we really want to keep all the garbage,
let us keep it somewhere else, in a corner, and let forbid web
engines to go through it, OK? With good peace of the dead letters!
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