Re: My notes from the chairs training sessions

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2021-12-03, at 12:53, Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> It's an underlying concept of "this really matters" rather than "this is my stylistic preference”

That distinction is less clear-cut that one might think.

Good protocol designers have *taste*.

That taste is shaped and honed over years and decades of seeing what goes wrong in protocol development.  

I mean, nobody would develop a new text-based protocol without availing themselves of a tool such as ABNF?  Right?   Nuff said…

The underlying problem (actually more a feature than a bug) is that collaborative development is done between people who have widely different experiences behind them (not just different levels of experience, but different areas).  It is sometimes hard to argue some point that grew out of experience and has gelled into taste, and the relevant experience may simply not be available to other participants.  Of course it is the job of a collaborator to translate that information as much as possible, but in particular the severity of a violation of important principles is hard to communicate.  Hence some expression of “over my dead body” (another piece of bad language) is occasionally needed.

I wouldn’t mind if we got used to a better way to say this.
MUST NOT GO FORWARD (i.e., better to stop work than to continue this particular way) may be the basis of one of them.

Grüße, Carsten