Mehdi Dogguy dijo [Sat, Apr 08, 2017 at 09:47:38AM +0200]: > To be honest, I also wondered why IRC channels were not logged when I > started contributing to Debian. Later, I understood that people used > IRC to communicate like they would do in real life. As such, we will > not try to record every conversation held between two contributors.
I'm surprised nobody has said so far something along the following lines, which I feel to be quite obvious. Our goals by archiving our communications via mailing lists is not "just" to prove everything we do is done in public. A mailing list message is usually a self-sustaining piece of information, even as a part of a conversation. They are easy to situate, and our usual practices (i.e. inline quoting, preserving threading, the way we handle Cc and Reply-to, etc.) help make each bit of information meaningful and indexable. IRC is just a shouting room. OK, sometimes it's way quieter, but each channel just a stream of messages that hold very little "state" - If you try to reconstruct what was said in an IRC conversation, if anything, you will have the destinatary of some lines (as we hold the convention of starting a line with <nickname><colon>). IRC is great for live communication, but is a very very lousy referential or citational material. Of course, that's one of the main drivers behind bots such as Meetbot, which organizes what is said during a specific interval by adding topicality and salient points. Of course, Meetbot logs are publicly accessible.
