On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, Lee Braiden wrote:
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 18:04:19 +0000 From: Lee Braiden <lee_b@...786...> To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Jabber logging
On Wednesday 02 November 2005 17:53, mental@...3... wrote:
Hmm, I always found the logs to be a valuable resource; particularly being searchable via google.
IMO, the Jabber channel is not the place for really private discussion.
I take it this means the IRC channel was logged too as both are interlinked?
Agreed. I must have missed something... is there a particular reason for needing private conversations?
It is not about need it is about IRC being an instant medium as opposed to email where you usually take a little longer to consider your thoughts amd you can reasonably expect your email messages to the list to be publicallly logged for all to see for a very long time.
Most IRC channels I am familiar with do not bother to log everything but they do occassionally log scheduled meetings and get short highly relevant logs.
Is Inkscape going "open source, but closed process"? Transparancy of development process is a valuable asset, I think.
The sheer scale of discussion makes it very difficult to anyone to keep track of it all. Anything of any significance discussed on IRC or Jabber really should be brought onlist.
It is a total non-sequiter to claim not logging all discussions is some kind of conspiracy to close the process and if you have so little trust in the Inkscape developers we have bigger problems. Keep in mind some useful discussions like those with Xara will largely be kept secret and there will always be offlist conversations which are not logged.
And yes, the ability to track down logs from two years ago, and explain to the community why a certain decision was taken,
We shouldn't need logs for that. Developers should be able to justify their decisions and if a decision can no longer be justfied with any better reason than "we've always done it that way" developers should be willing to accept changes and reconsider things (or stangnate and die).
Commit logs, changelogs, and other documentation need to clearly document coding decision and give a reasonably clear audit trail of who submitted what code. Properly doing a little as you go along is a lot easier than having to trawl massive dicussion logs.
or why that company's lawsuit is B.S. is pretty important too.
What lawsuit?
Having said all that anyone logged in to the channel can log it. I could say I had a reasonable expecation of privacy (not being logged, recorded) based on the fact that other channels are not usually logged but with the knowledge that anyone can log the conversation it is difficult to complain. I would ask one thing, if the channel is going to be official logged please make sure the channel topic (or welcome message) clearly announces this fact.
With more logs and more mailing list traffic it would be really cool if someone was willing to post summary messages or weekly news or the equivalent of kernel traffic. In a way we already get that informally through developers writing about Inkscape in their journals and the bits of news which do regularly get posted to the site but there are probably more aspects of inkscape development which make interesting reading if summarised and presented in a concise way.
I'd prefer if Jabber wasn't logged but anyone can log it with telling us so officially loggin the channel might not be such a bad idea (and I vaguely recall reading about a tool which can parse IRC logs and generate intersting pages based on links posted and other keywords, which sounds kinda cool).
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/