James Carlson wrote:

> Let's not forget that we're talking about "open" cases here.  Someone
> has already put some thought into determining that the discussions
> should be open, so closing off materials needs to be a last resort, not
> a first one.  Closed discussions can always happen on a @sun.com mailing
> list or (better yet) by creating an intentionally "closed" case.

A lot of the cases had been published when they shouldn't have been. 
That's not a sufficient justification for continuing to do so.

> Also, as many inside Sun have asked, a tool that allows a diligent case
> owner or engineer to scan an individual file and report problems is
> highly desirable.  It's just silly to be in a position where folks have
> to edit some files, wait an hour to see how the web site changes, then
> edit again, wait another hour, and so on.  It just heaps inconvenience
> on an already thankless task.

It clearly bears restating that the old tool had got to the point whre 
it was in effect mounting a continual DOS on opensolaris.org, both from 
the traffic it generated and the volume of content it had uploaded to 
the current portal.  The choices were either to permanently remove all 
ARC material altogether, or to quickly put together something that 
provided access, and we took the second option in the interests of 
keeping the information as available as we could.  That in no way 
translates into a commitment to manage, maintain or enhance the ARC 
infrastructure.

In addition, most of the problems need fixing upstream of the external 
publishing step - for example if a mail to a case log looks like it 
contains confidential information it should be rejected and not be added 
to the case log in the first place.  Similarly the ARC management tools 
should do the checking an classification processing needed to 
distinguish between closed and open cases.  Trying to intuit the status 
of a case based purely on processing the case materials after the fact 
is *always* going to be less than satisfactory.

In addition, we are responsible for ensuring that any information 
published on opensolaris.org meets any restrictions that are placed on 
us.  If confidential information appears on the site when it shouldn't 
is is this team that bears the responsibility, not members of the wider 
community.  Whilst we'll try our best to be accommodating (e.g. my 
suggestion of how we might improve the handling of the opinion.ms 
files), we don't have free reign in this matter.

-- 
Alan Burlison
--

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