On Wed, Jan 6, 2021 at 1:48 PM Salz, Rich <rsalz=40akamai.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
- I guess I'm wondering: what are the actual virtues of github (other than that some people are already familiar with it)
You brush that aside as if it’s of no consequence. GitHub claims As of January 2020, GitHub reports having over 52 million users and more than 28 million public repositories. Since we want to engage the open source community, it behooves to make accomodations, rather than try to say “use this, it’s better.” Fortunately, the accommodation is something the IETF has already approved, and left use of to individual working groups.
That is irrelevant. I use Git all the time for the purpose for which it is designed - managing source code. I do not use it as a process driven collaboration tool because it is not at all well designed for that except within the very narrow focus of managing and tracking code.
And to go back to an earlier point, I think the fact that most working groups only have a small core of active members is actually something we need to think about. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, it is a fact that goes completely against what the IETF claims to stand for.
IF we are ok with specifications being written by small groups with little outside input then IETF is wasting a heck of a lot of time and effort trying to enable cross-area review. I have absolutely no problem with the small group model, it is the one that we adopted at W3C and one that I did a lot of my early work in. If that is the outcome people really want, then we should stop having three plenary meetings a year with 2 hour sessions for 60 WGs and do the bulk of the work in all-day meetings of a single WG.
QUIC is a really bad example for people to keep bringing up because it is completely atypical of standards work. And again, my criticism of using git comes from spending a lot of time asking the question of how we can do better.
- But mostly, to me, github looks like a huge impediment
By my reckoning, you’re in the rough here. Even if the entire IETF community agreed with you – and they don’t – the percentage would still be a round-off error and approximates to zero.
My experience of the OpenPGP BIS WG was that the attempt to use github were one of the things that led to its failure.
Sure, I know that email isn't great either and as for Slack...
