On 4/9/2023 9:27 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
Yes, Github does have some features that can be used to support
collaboration. But it is a collaboration flow engine wrapped around a
source code management system and it is really not built for what we
need for our work. So while it has some advantages, you have to be
using Github **in a collaborative setting** pretty much every day to
remember how it all works. The notion of forking a repository so I can
submit a pull request in order to comment on something is obscurantism
at best.
Agree. Really it's more of a coincidence that github can be made to
work at all for collaboration on IETF documents, and it only works
because lots of IETFers already know git and/or github, and IETF uses
XML for its editable document format. But from a different point of
view, both of those choices (git and XML) make it more difficult for
people to participate effectively in IETF. And I still think that early
in a document's life cycle, generating pull requests is a really poor
way to collaborate, and not only because of the baroque user
interface. PRs only work for collaborating on a technical
specification when the document is already relatively mature and most of
the changes needed are fairly localized.
It is possible to use GitHub to collaborate on an XML text, but most
projects that I know of do not do that. They collaborate on editing a
Markdown document, and then use tools to translate Markdown in the IETF
XML format. This may very well be because using XML for collaboration is
hard.
Also, many projects try to not use PRs for discussion. They use issues
instead, and only nominate an editor to propose a PR once the issue is
well understood. There might be a discussion on the PR itself, but the
participants are supposed to try limit that to editorial comments. Of
course, emphasis on try -- tools cannot enforce that.
-- Christian Huitema
