Chris Douglas wrote:
+1 to the overall sentiment (broadened to deleting attachments from JIRA), but I'm -1 to preventing editing of comments unless it has a grace period of at least 15 minutes.
Can you retract email for 15 minutes? Each comment generates an email, and many people follow comments through email. If you're going to generate another email to everyone, why not make it intelligible, rather than just a slightly modified regurgitation of your previous email?
If you make a mistake in email, what do you do? If it's serious, you send another consise email correcting the mistake. Editing a jira comment does not achieve this. Adding a new comment does.
Despite the preview (which many haven't found), unexpected formatting quirks and unintended assertions/offense are common; such a policy would harm clarity and generate noise.
But using edit to fix these generates even more noise! If folks are forced to live with their mistakes, then perhaps they'll find that preview buttion and be more careful next time.
Even for attachments, if someone accidentally discloses private data, they shouldn't need to leave it exposed while they beg a project admin to remove it.
If someone accidentally attaches private data in an email to a publicly archived list then they've permanently disclosed their data. Hadoop emails are archived so many places that it is effectively impossible to retract one.
Community standards don't always need automated controls.
I've complained about this so many times over the years, and the community control doesn't seem to work. Moreover, I don't think there's *ever* a reason to edit a comment: it generates noise, the information is already archived all over and cannot be retracted. If folks are not comfortable with this then they should not send email to Hadoop lists either.
Doug
