[Development] PSA: Qt Project IRC logs & statistics

[Robin Burchell]

On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 9:40 PM, Alan Alpert <416365416c at gmail.com> wrote:
> Given those guidelines, our possible answers are either "No (i.e.
> there is no permission given for public logging)" or "list it in the
> channel topic for logged channels (and possibly leave some channels
> deliberately unlogged)".
>
> I'm personally in favor of the latter, because the free flow of
> information is generally useful to open projects (and this is *not*
> sensitive personal data).

This pretty much sums up the reasoning for why I've been doing this
all along. Some knowledge is passed down through IRC (and
unfortunately not recorded elsewhere). Having the ability to find that
again when required is often an invaluable resource. As a very simple
example, #qt-labs a long time ago is where I learned about memory
barriers and reordering. The same can be said about #qt -- the primary
purpose of most people going there is to learn, and to ask
questions/help each other, and what better way to do that than helping
to retain a collective memory?

I do think that having an archive of discussion of useful topics like
that in general is invaluable, just like a mailing list archive, a VCS
commit log, etc.

BTW: I had the same concerns pointed out to me privately, which is why
the logs are offline again at the moment until I can take the time to
remove information that isn't of interest to the project such as IP
addresses. I haven't had the time to do this, or to send mails about
this, until now, but I do agree with removing it. It isn't technically
or socially useful.