Re: Old directions in social media.

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 1/5/21 12:08 PM, Kyle Rose wrote:

> I do not understand why tools need to be limited by the least common 
> denominator for the IETF as a whole, or limited to 1982 technology. 
> Why is it such a burden to ask people to learn a new tool once every 3 
> decades or so? Clearly, git (along with related tooling, such as 
> kramdown) is of great value to many because they've spread across the 
> IETF at (for this group) an incredibly rapid pace.
>
> IMO, a better response to the challenges posed by useful new tooling 
> is to make it more accessible, not to prohibit it.

If the new tooling were anywhere nearly objectively better overall, you 
might have a point.

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.

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.

We did the experiment.  Now it's time to stop the experiment, collect 
some results and learn from it.

Keith