Im +1 to this. The email thread is not serving any purpose other than to perpetuate negative feelings against FESCo members and the contributor named in the announcement.

That being said, @pingou will the council still have access to the original email after its been removed from the public lists? I suspect the person who will do the investigation for the council might need access to it to re-read the initial announcement, so if they can retain access to it, I think removing it is the decent thing to do and am in favour.

+1 here too but I agree with Aoife.

+1

I am 100% in favor of this. The messages can be extracted and saved somewhere, just not in the public archives. I do agree that's necessary for the purposes of the investigation.

It should be possible to backup the original email (or the entire thread if desired) - we could ask Kevin for confirmation.
If the council member who is doing the investigation is subscribed to the devel list, they will still have their local copy from their mailbox. It's only the public archive that will be affected.

So, which thread do you mean? I see:

The orig announcement:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/KVMWPLVTGZ2GHOW5FBAYP52HUUVWGWKT/
(26 posts)

The fesco note about being sorry:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/APPQTO2M53XUNMARLWMSSGD2PDK5W7K4/
(64 posts)

Also worth noting that anyone who got those posts and comes back from break may well reply to it further, so even if we delete them now, there may be ongoing posts.
(This could I suppose be mitigated by making a blocking rule for the subject/references to moderation).

There were I think useful posts in both threads, talking about expectations and how we could clarify / change provenpackager policies, but a new thread could be started with those.

Actions like these need to be done faster to be effective, IMHO. This was already covered in LWN.net: https://lwn.net/Articles/1002450/ and they also seem to mirror the messages: https://lwn.net/ml/all/d384140b-65db-4a41-9b1c-473f39c586f4@redhat.com/

IMHO it would be good to actually ask @pbrobinson what he would like to be done about the archive. I guess he has the right to have this deleted due to the GDPR.

Apologies on the delay in reply on this, I have been travelling and wanted to sleep on it.

I'm not sure removing the thread actually achieves anything TBH, it's like closing the gate after the horse has bolted. We are not the only archivers of the various Fedora lists.

When the council inevitably posts to devel and there's follow up if the community then finds things missing I think all removal will do is further erode trust in the project. I think at the very least if there's any cleanup it should be done as part of the outcome of the council's decision not randomly and that it should remain in place until at least that point.

This whole incident has been unfortunate (I am still awaiting details of what I have done TBH) but it happened in the open and as painful as it may be, at least at the moment, I feel it needs to remain in the open to show the project is in fact open and honest with itself despite how painful that may be. As someone else mentioned, there is some good discussion in both threads and it will serve as a reminder to everyone as a whole how much the community expects openness and transparency.

So at the moment I am -1.

Given that @pbrobinson is -1 to this request, I will close this ticket.