Re: GOP-PROP 6: private mailing lists

[Valentin Villenave]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Trevor Daniels <address@hidden> wrote:
> I would be in favour of a fixed private mailing list with publicly
> known members to decide a publicly known list of issues,
> including the obvious granting/withdrawing git push access,
> but probably little else.  Membership should be either Graham,
> Han-Wen and Jan, or these three supplemented by two others.
> Requests for a private discussion would be sent to this list,
> avoiding the single-Graham point of failure.

Once again, you make some excellent points.However if said list has to
be limited to *five* people, I do question the need for a mailing list
at all, rather than merely CCing whomever needs to be CCed.

The whole point of mailing lists, in my opinion, is archives: if this
list's archives are not meant to be made public, ever, then I'm
certainly missing the point (assuming there's one) of having a mailing
list.
I personally have been spending days browsing through the LilyPond and
Guile mailing list archives, including very old (sometimes heated or
controversial) discussions that nobody really cares about today.
Therefore I have been suggesting that archives could be "declassified"
after a given amount of time (five or seven years seem quite enough
for any sensitive debate to cool off and lose any potential
disruptiveness).

No matter how, a key issue, as you pointed out, is that the list of
people in charge, as well as the general topics they discuss, should
be made public. And first off, obviously, it should be officially
acknowledged that such non-public discussions exist.

(Mild) cheers,
Valentin.