Hi Jean-Francois,
IMO, using IRC should be limited as much as possible. This is the best
way to get the dev insolated from the community :
- not everyone has access to IRC, especially in companies
- due to TZ differences, it might be impossible to gather people at a
specific date
- people may not be informed that some discussion are going on on a
channel, as there are no way to inform them about this discussion.
ML on the other side guarantees that the three previous points are
never an issue. Everyone can follow the discussion, even if it's a few
hours after the first mail has been posted, and everyone is informed
that there is a discussion going on, as soon as they read their
mailbox.
The bigger risk is to separate the community in two groups : those who
use IRC, and those who don't and get out of the decision process. Btw,
the conf calls are having exactly the same issues...
Not to mention that :
1) even if you ask people to forward the convo on the ML, they will
often forget to do so and
2) if you are using a bot, it may stop working...
Just my 2 cts...
--
Regards,
Cordialement,
Emmanuel Lécharny
www.iktek.com