Re: Notification to list from IETF Moderators team

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--On Wednesday, October 12, 2022 20:34 +0900 Masataka Ohta
<mohta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Lars Eggert wrote:
> 
>> I believe that as a non-native speaker of English, the
>> moderators may have given you the benefit of doubt in the
>> past. I'm sure they will notice your admission of intent.
> 
> So, there was, and still is, a mechanism to send initial
> warning
> messages.
> 
> But, as I wrote:
> 
> : which initiated no action by SAAs or an IETF chair.
> 
> there was no initial private or public warning message sent
> against so explicit trial of:
> 
> : Let me try.
> :
> : IPv6 with unnecessarily lengthy 16B addresses without valid
> : technical reasoning only to make network operations
> prohibitively
> : painful is a garbage protocol.
> :
> : LISP, which perform ID to locator mapping, which is best
> : performed by DNS, in a lot less scalable way than DNS
> : is a garbage protocol.

(Readers of this list: the note that follows is one I would
normally send privately but, given the style and nature of this
discussion, it is probably appropriate to have it be public.)

Ohta-san,

It seems to me that there are two nearly separate issues here.

One has to do with whether the threshold for particular language
being considered bad behavior is lower than it was a few years,
or a decade or more, ago.  "Lower threshold", in that context,
means that some words or phrases that would have been tolerated
without comment then are treated as problems now.  I think the
answer to that question is clearly "yes".  The issues for
discussion is whether that lowered threshold is appropriate and
how far we go.   As an extreme example, I sometimes write a
sentence similar to "That way of doing something is
<expletive>."   One the one hand, I have not used any of the
terms that might appear on someone's list of bad words, so the
sentence should be ok.   On the other, my intent was to say
something nasty, so maybe I should be sanctioned.

My personal opinion is that the other issue is, in the long
term, far more important to the IETF.  You have been
participating in the IETF for many years.  During those years,
I've seen a number of contributions from you that I believe were
useful technically, whether I agreed or not.   Regardless of the
vocabulary you use, statements like "Protocol X is Y", by
themselves or even with the type of statement you make above,
are not helpful.  They are not helpful if "Y" is a negative
term; they are equally not helpful if "Y" is a positive one.
What is helpful, both to the debate and to the quality of the
IETF's consensus and output, is an explanation of why you have
reached that conclusion and, ideally when your conclusion is
negative, suggestions about  better alternatives.

Taking your second example above as an example, I disagree that
use of the DNS for the purposes for which LISP is designed would
be a good idea (or even a better one) especially when one
considers recent trends in DNS development.  There is probably
an interesting, and technically and substantively useful,
discussion to be had about the difference in our opinions.   But
a conversation that essentially consists of "it is bad", "no,
you are wrong", "no, _you_ are wrong", and so on does not help
anyone.

Can you please concentrate on those explanations rather than on
statements like those above?  While you might still incur the
wrath of the Moderator team and others if you use what is
considered inappropriate language these days, the explanations
would help us understand your perspective and the reasons behind
it and contribute to the discussions.   You might even convince
people although in the two example above, I'd be surprised.   It
would also help with what I assume is one of your goals, i.e.,
to actually have your messages read rather than discarded
because people have concluded you have nothing constructive or
useful to say (again, regardless of the vocabulary you choose).

thanks,
   john




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