GOP-PROP 6: private mailing lists (probable decision)

[Graham Percival]

Most people seem to like the status quo.

http://lilypond.org/~graham/gop/gop_6.html

** Proposal summary

Potentially sensitive or private matters will be referred to
Graham. He will then decide who should discuss the matter on an
ad-hoc basis, and forward or CC them on future emails.

For emphasis, the project administrators are Han-Wen, Jan, and
Graham; those three will always be CC’d on any important
discussions.

The lilypond-hackers mailing list will be removed.


** Status quo

At the moment, this seems to be our custom. Whenever something
comes up, somebody sends me a private email, and I pick an ad-hoc
collection of people to discuss it with. Always Han-Wen and Jan,
but often Carl, Trevor, and others.

Other than the obvious “giving git push ability”, recent questions
included a university project who wanted to have a focus group to
discuss development. I thought we could just discuss it on -devel,
but the university group wanted to keep it private. I didn’t see
any harm in that, so we arranged something privately with an
ad-hoc collection of lilypond developers.


** History

There is some unhappy history about this idea in our development
community:
        

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2010-09/msg00178.html
http://news.lilynet.net/spip.php?article121
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2010-11/msg00076.html


** Other projects

The idea of private mailing lists is hardly uncommon in
open-source software. For example,

http://lwn.net/Articles/394660/   about debian-private
http://subversion.apache.org/mailing-lists.html  private@
http://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-core
http://foundation.gnome.org/legal/   board members pledge
to keep certain matters confidential

every security team of every linux distribution and OS

In fact, Karl Fogel’s “Producing Open Source Software” explicitly
suggests a private mailing list for some circumstances:
        

[on granting commit/push access to a contributor]

But here is one of the rare instances where secrecy is
appropriate. You can't have votes about potential committers
posted to a public mailing list, because the candidate's feelings
(and reputation) could be hurt.

http://producingoss.com/en/consensus-democracy.html#electorate


** Board of governers, voting, etc?

Many projects have an official board of directors, or a list of
“core developers”, with set term limits and elections and stuff.

I don’t think that we’re that big. I think we’re still small
enough, and there’s enough trust and consensus decisions, that we
can avoid that. I would rather that we kept on going with
trust+consensus for at least the next 2-3 years, and spent more
time+energy on bug fixes and new features instead of
administrative stuff.

Project administrators are Han-Wen, Jan, and Graham.


** Implementation notes

Graham’s email address will be added to the website “contact”
page, at the bottom of the “Developer discussion” box, with the
caption:
        
  Private matters should be sent to Graham Percival, who
  will discuss it with those concerned.


Cheers,
- Graham