If the new tooling were anywhere nearly objectively better
overall, you might have a point.
Generally speaking, there's no such thing as "objectively better", so that's a rather high bar to reach. But clearly there are participants who have found GitHub to be an amazing productivity enhancement.
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.
How is this penalizing participants? You can still engage on the mailing list in the traditional way. No one is required to use GitHub to participate in any WG, and chairs should push back in the event an author implies that a PR is required for a contribution.
Does GitHub make it *easier* for those who know the tools to contribute? Of course: that's exactly the point. Learn the tools and you too can benefit.
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.
It does sometimes split discussion, which is where the WG chairs need to step in and move discussion from an issue to the mailing list when that happens. If that isn't happening, talk to the chairs or the AD.
We did the experiment. Now it's time to stop the experiment,
collect some results and learn from it.
From where I sit, it's been a tremendous success. Why would we voluntarily hamstring ourselves by moving back to a less efficient universal model for contribution?
Kyle
