On Fri, 2016-05-27 at 13:27 +0100, Brian Spector wrote:
> Hopefully this makes the folks who want to use Slack happy and also the
> Apache Community happy who, rightly so, want a record of information that
> has transpired to be logged into the mailing lists.
Chat and mail are different in nature. I don't want a mailbox
full of trivial messages that are meaningless out of context
and administrivia, nor do I want all my chat trivia ("gotta go
and get a pint of milk", "hang on ... on the 'phone") to be
constrained by the thought that it's going to pollute the
list for everyone.
In short, a gateway needs to be under human control, and more
discriminating.
Apache has some experience with such gatewaying. Members'
formal meetings take place over IRC with a bot acting as
secretary and (among other things) posting the record of
the meeting to the mailinglist. That comes with helpful
tools: things can be marked as off-record, and a back-
channel is provided for free chat that won't be posted.
Crucially, the meeting is posted as a single message,
making it readable as a record.
In other circumstances on freenode (and not just apache
channels) it's more usual to *ban* indiscriminate logging,
precisely because it constrains chat.
Can your mailclark be configured to work under human
control? A chat log may want to be preserved on occasion,
but those occasions should be when chat deals with
significant project matters, and any message probably
should have a brief intro (like a commit message) telling
at-a-glance what it's about. And a way to keep individual
messages un-logged? For example, as in members meetings
logs where messages can be marked [off] record, and /me
messages are also excluded.
--
Nick Kew
