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Declassifying debian-private?

The debian-private mailing list is, as its name would imply, for Debian developers to have private discussions that do not belong on the public lists. Back in 2005, the project held a (public) discussion on whether the debian-private messages should eventually be "declassified" and made public; after that, a general resolution (GR) was passed to do so. It was (and is) believed that some of the topics discussed are of historical interest. Since that time, there has been no real progress made to do so, though, which has led to calls to readdress the GR.

Nicolas Dandrimont brought up the issue on the debian-vote mailing list with a proposed GR that would acknowledge that the 2005 GR has never been implemented and that it never will be, so it should be repealed. He noted that nearly five years after the GR, then Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli had asked for volunteers to work on the declassification process for messages posted after the GR had passed—as the specific wording of the choice that passed required. But nothing came of it, so:

There were many who seconded the GR, which led Debian Secretary Kurt Roeckx to set up a vote page for it. But there were also some who had questions or thoughts about the proposal. As Jakub Wilk pointed out, the title of the GR ("Acknowledge that the debian-private list will remain private") doesn't actually match the text, which simply repeals the earlier GR and encourages minimizing the use of debian-private. "If you want -private remain private forever, say so explicitly."

But Dandrimont disagreed, saying that whether debian-private messages stayed private forever is not really the point. "The acknowledgement is about failing to implement the existing GR, being honest about it, and to let us move on from it." Don Armstrong generally agreed with that sentiment, but did not "see the utility of voting to remove the possibility of ever implementing it".

Armstrong mentioned that he had tried to work on declassification a time or two, "but the process required was far too clunky". He is considering proposing an amendment to Dandrimont's GR that "either acknowledges that we have failed to declassify -private for the time being, or gives listmaster@ the ability to define a published procedure for the automated declassification of private". MJ Ray, though, said that Armstrong was "being far too nice" when he called the process clunky:

Russ Allbery would like to see the possibility of declassification removed until someone comes up with a workable scheme to do so and another vote is taken. Right now, the specter of declassification hangs over posts made to debian-private:

The only reference to the mailing list in Debian's governing documents is in the Debian Developer's Reference, which doesn't really address declassification one way or another—though it would seem to strongly imply that messages to the list are ... well ... private. However, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud argued that it is up to the ListMaster team to determine what to do about the archives in the absence of a GR to the contrary. So if the 2005 GR is repealed, that's where the responsibility would lie:

That seems to be in keeping with Dandrimont's thinking as well. In response to a question from Roeckx about the pre-2005 messages, Dandrimont also suggested that the ListMasters are the proper authority:

The hope of finding some kind of automated process to handle declassification seems forlorn. That means humans would need to wade through the messages to try to determine which posts were sensitive and thus shouldn't be made public. That too seems rather daunting. The most likely outcome would seem to be the status quo—whether a GR ever comes to a vote on the question or not.

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