Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Council Reminder for August 7

[Mark Loeser]

Lukasz Damentko <rane@g.o> said:
> Fair enough. Let me wrap up the IRC part.
>
> 1. I'd like to ask Council to discuss possible reactions to our
> developer being banned from Freenode without providing us with a
> reason. The situation looks like one of Freenode staffers overreacted
> over something Chris said during previous Council meeting and banned
> him to prevent him from attending next meetings when he was supposed
> to provide more information on the CoC topic. The ban was removed
> after an hour, but they still refuse to provide us with reasons for it
> which looks like (mostly because we weren't shown any sane
> justification for the ban) a cover up operation. It would be good if
> Council officially protested against that ban and demanded a detailed
> explanation from Freenode staff.

Due to their privacy policy I don't think we'll ever be able to get
adequate explanations from Freenode staff when our devs are banned.

> 2. I want Council to consider moving their meetings somewhere where
> third parties can't control who in Gentoo can attend and who can't.
> Like our own small and created just for this purpose IRC server. A
> situation when a third party may disallow our developer from attending
> a meeting without even telling us why isn't the healthiest one. We
> should be independent from such decisions of third parties so they
> can't politically influence Council decisions by removing people who
> are inconvenient for them. Now when it (most probably) happened once,
> we have no other choice but to believe it's possible it will happen
> again.

If for some reason a developer was unable to attend a meeting due to
being klined or the internet being FUBAR'd, I know that I have my IM
details available in LDAP for that dev to be able to contact me, or they
could send the entire council an email. I don't think setting up our own
IRC server is worth the trouble for this small purpose.

> 3. I want Council to consider creating and using irc.gentoo.org alias
> instead of irc.freenode.net in our docs, news items and so on. The
> alias would allow us to move out of the network more easily should we
> ever decide to do so. Debian did exactly the same a couple of months
> ago prior to them moving out to OFTC
> (http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060604)  so maybe it would be a
> good idea to have this for Gentoo too. Infra (Shyam Mani) say it isn't
> a problem at all to create and maintain it, we in fact already have
> something like this pointing at Freenode, it would be just a question
> of updating that alias and updating our docs with it. It would
> increase our independence from Freenode and make future network
> switching much easier should we ever decide it's time to part our ways
> with our current IRC service provider.

I like this idea.  spb rose some concerns in the meeting with regards to
some users thinking that if they came onto irc.gentoo.org and joined #java
that it would be a Gentoo java channel, but it doesn't seem like
Freenode considers this to be much of a problem.  For evidence of this:
http://freenode.net/acknowledgements.shtml

They thank projects for pointing their domains to them, so I believe
that the network as a whole shouldn't have a problem with this.  If
someone thinks I'm misunderstanding what they mean on that page, please
let me know.

Thanks,

-- 
Mark Loeser
email         -   halcy0n AT gentoo DOT org
email         -   mark AT halcy0n DOT com
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