On 1/5/21 12:08 PM, Kyle Rose wrote:
I do not understand why tools need to be limited by the least common denominator for the IETF as a whole, or limited to 1982 technology. Why is it such a burden to ask people to learn a new tool once every 3 decades or so? Clearly, git (along with related tooling, such as kramdown) is of great value to many because they've spread across the IETF at (for this group) an incredibly rapid pace.
IMO, a better response to the challenges posed by useful new tooling is to make it more accessible, not to prohibit it.
If the new tooling were anywhere nearly objectively better overall, you might have a point.
Why in the world should IETF penalize the vast majority of its participants in order to favor open source software developers? Because that's exactly what this is doing. I like open source software too and definitely want us to be inclusive, but not at the expense of significantly penalizing other participants.
And I can see why the model of making it easy to submit and manage text changes, late in a document's development, can make sense for IETF in general. But git/github is still a really poor interface for this, and PHB is exactly right that this actually impairs and splits the discussion.
We did the experiment. Now it's time to stop the experiment, collect some results and learn from it.
Keith
