Carsten, I think you seriously overstate teh case.
There are costs for using any tool. In some cases, those costs are more
than paid for by the benefits. In other case, not.
We do have basic revision control and archival recovery available
already. So the question for using git for developing I-Ds is whether
the additional complexity is warranted by the additional value.
In some cases, it has been demonstrated to pay off. Clearly, the cost
is lower if all of the folks working on the document are already using
git for other reasons. Even without that, when there are multiple
people actively working on the document, some form of multi-user
revision and update control is very helpful. Git seems to be a good match.
Many I-Ds have multiple authors, but in practice only one pen-holder.
Particularly for simpler I-Ds, the benefits of using git to complement
our eixisting archival version control does not seem to pay off.
As I understand it, the current state of play is to allow working groups
to use git when they deem it helpful. ANd the purpose of the proposed
working group is to write down and agree on common good practices when
doing that. Pretty hard to argue with that. But to the degree that
folks make arguments like yours below that seem to be using it as an
excuse to argue that we should all use git all the time, I will object.
(To be clear, I do not think that the original proposers were asking for
that, and I am not objecting to the charter as written. I am asking the
folks remember that there are MANY different perspectives both in terms
of tool chains and in terms of the kind of I-Ds that need to be
generated. NFSv4 is not the same as QUIC is not the same as the draft
on fragmentation considered harmful.)
Yours,
Joel
On 1/21/19 2:18 AM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
Rather weird to read an entire article talking about 'forges'
that doesn’t mention SourceForge, the granddaddy of them all
Sourceforge is the worst choice I’m aware of.
(Yes, we did projects on Sourceforge when they were the only play in town.
We got rid of them when they became criminals [drive-by installers].
Yes, they have new management, but I have no idea why one would go back.)
My take is that, if you're contemplating using git as a necessary
tool to help you develop and maintain an internet-draft, you should
question why you’re writing an internet-draft in the first place...
People who do software know that documents are code and need revision control as much as the other code. Git is the consensus way to do collaborative revision control. Why on earth would I use it for everything else and not for my Internet-Drafts?
Grüße, Carsten
(Git is “not necessary” in the same way that toilets are “not necessary”.
Yes, you can do without, but it is so much cleaner with them, so they have become the standard.)
