Re: Never-ending arguments about mailing lists considered harmful (was: Re: Adding [ietf] considered harmful)
John, JCKSince the secretariat is JCK operating with very tight resources (something else that has JCK been in enough documents and presentations that I assume/hope JCK everyone knows), it is in _our_ advantage to let them automate JCK anything they can sensibly automate without causing _severe_ JCK problems. Conversely, asking for things that might take large JCK amounts of time and energy (such as per-user setting of tag JCK fields or application of spam filtering), is, IMO, pretty lousy JCK prioritization. Let's take this a bit further: For any suggestion involving computing and/or communication functionality, proposals should come with the resources to do the major work, where the Secretariat only has to provide some interface information. JCK (iii) I am, personally, getting concerned that the IETF is JCK approaching the point where we are more concerned about process JCK and administration than we are about doing high-quality design yup. So, here is a simple suggestion for anyone proposing anything in the IETF: Explain what real and significant problem it responds to and what it will take to develop and operate it. Who must do the work, what are their incentives for doing it and why should we believe they will be successful at doing it anytime soon? Interestingly, this applies both to protocol design suggestions and to IETF process revision. We need to start focusing on small sets of essential, near-term problems, with core, near-term solutions. As a group, we have zero success with any other approach. d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253
Never-ending arguments about mailing lists considered harmful (was: Re: Adding [ietf] considered harmful)
Keith and others, While... (1) I agree that this (and any SpamAssassin or other header-insertion or filtering) would, ideally, better be done as a per-subscriber optional feature, and (2) I recognize that, if for some reason (unfathomable to me, but there is no accounting for taste), people encapsulate messages in message/rfc822 body parts and then sign them (or archive hashes of messages including the headers), any modification of the encapsulated message would wreak havoc, and (3) I've got an MUA (and an MTA) that are capable of filtering on Return-path and/or List-* and/or receipient (including subaddress)fields, there are three things about this discussion that bother me... (i) A number of efforts within the community have pointed to the advantages of having more routine work done in a routine and automated way by the secretariat. Since the secretariat is operating with very tight resources (something else that has been in enough documents and presentations that I assume/hope everyone knows), it is in _our_ advantage to let them automate anything they can sensibly automate without causing _severe_ problems. Conversely, asking for things that might take large amounts of time and energy (such as per-user setting of tag fields or application of spam filtering), is, IMO, pretty lousy prioritization. (ii) Even with powerful filtering and organizing tools, some of us prefer (as a matter of taste) to not have, e.g., one folder or color per mailing list or other correspondent. For us, a subject line indicator of source makes it easier to organize things cognitively. Is it a big deal one way or the other? Not for me at least; I can't speak for others. But it is helpful to some of us, regardless of what the MTA or MUA may or be able to do. And that makes me (at least) a little intolerant of people starting religious wars that, themselves, consume large amounts of (human as well as network) bandwidth, if only because... (iii) I am, personally, getting concerned that the IETF is approaching the point where we are more concerned about process and administration than we are about doing high-quality design and engineering and getting high-quality results out. I don't think we are there yet, and I think the trends in that direction are still reversible, but I take * the relative amount of energy the community seems willing to spend discussing two, essentially trivial, changes to mailing list management, or * the fine details (rather than broad issues) of a process WG charter, or * heated arguments about proposals for which most of the people actively participating in the discussions have clearly not read the relevant documents, or * IESG being willing to tie up Proposed Standards (or even lower-maturity documents) in order to make sure that all of the grammatical and procedural niceties are adhered to, or probably several other things that belong on that list... as symptoms of serious and deep problems with our priorities and how we do business. For the record, before I'm quoted out of context (as I probably will be anyway), our copying procedures from SDOs that have become much more procedure-bound, so much so that they often appear to no longer care about quality or adoption or interoperability of standards as long as the many procedural rules are followed to the letter and they can report getting more standards out one year than in the previous one would not, IMO, be a good idea ... indeed, it would be closer to the height of stupidity. To make a distinction that may be useful before you (or someone else) replies, if you (or someone else) wants to get on a tear about NATs, I may or may not agree with you, and I may or may not believe that the flaming the topic tends to generate will result in any real progress or changes in behavior, but at least I'm sure the issue is important to the future of the Internet. Can you say the same for whether the Secretariat and its mailing list machinery adds (or does not add) a few headers to a message or a few characters to a subject line ... assuming they don't _break_ conforming software used in a rational way (e.g., with the robustness principle in mind)? And, if the answer is no, is there any hope of increasing the ratio of meaningful technical standards work to this sort of debate around here? regards, john --On Thursday, 18 December, 2003 09:58 -0500 Keith Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: sarchasm Maybe we should also rewrite the From header field so that people with dysfunctional MUAs won't have trouble replying to the list? Maybe we should also rewrite the Reply-to field so that it doesn't matter when people get confused about the difference between reply to author and reply all?
Re: Never-ending arguments about mailing lists considered harmful (was: Re: Adding [ietf] considered harmful)
John, Trying to make this response a brief one, and hopefully the last message I need to write on this topic for a while. 1) While I generally support reducing secretariat workload when possible, I don't think it follows that it's to our advantage to let them automate anything they can sensibly automate without causing severe problems, particularly without taking due care in how it is done. We've had quite a few problems already with lists being subject to arbitrary censorship, and many of spamassassin's criteria have no sound justification. I should at this point re-iterate that so far nothing harmful has been done, and it does look like there's some attempt at due care. I hope that publicizing this issue will encourage more due care. 2) I have given several reasons for objecting to adding [xxx] to message headers, ranging from theoretical/academic arguments about separation-of-function and layering to statements of personal experience that this very practice causes problems with reading mail on small displays, with searching, etc. These are not absolutes but merely factors that people should consider rather than immediately assuming that subject munging is a good idea. 3) It's gotten to the point that almost any argument about a technical subtlety on the IETF list gets labelled a religious war. I suspect this is partly because we're straining to articulate the justification for our positions (so they look somewhat like religious arguments even when there's an underlying technical basis for them), but that's inherent in the fact that these subjects are subtle. I remember a time when we valued the exchange that helped to illuminate these subtleties and give justification for our positions, and when we did not think that this level of exchange was inappropriate or an excessive consumption of bandwidth. I'm not sure what has changed, but I hope it's not the case that we can no longer try to understand subtle effects of technical decisions - because I believe our inability to do that has caused the quality of our output to suffer tremendously. 4) I see the [xxx] labelling as a design issue. Even if we claim we're only designing for ourselves, it's still a concern because to me the casual attitude toward adding [xxx] reflects a lack of understanding of fundamental network protocol design principles. I see the spamassassin filtering as a process issue, but one that affects our ability to produce good designs, because I've seen several occasions where valuable input from outsiders was discarded for arbitrary reasons and the design suffered for it. John, I know you well enough to know that - You've seen more than a few problems with header munging yourself, and with munging of protocols by intermediaries in general; - You are more aware than most that the Internet is a diverse community with widely varying needs and capabilities and that it is becoming more diverse all the time; - You know enough about protocol design to appreciate the value of separation of layers in general, and of separation of function between user agent and transport in particular; and - You know enough about information storage and retrieval systems to appreciate the value in keeping data models clean. So I don't think I need to convince you of these things. If I'm talking to you specifically, I try to frame my statements with knowledge of your experience and depth in mind. When I make statements like the above on the IETF mailing list, I'm doing so for the benefit of people who don't seem to understand these things (regardless of who is in the To field), and part of my reason for doing so is to try to remedy that situation in a small way. Any good design is necessarily a compromise. It might be that there are cases where, _after_ considering the various factors, that adding [xxx] is a reasonable compromise, particularly for a list that operates only for a year or two - one can argue that UA capabilities won't change much while the list is in use. However such compromises are _not_ justified by statements of the form it works for me, therefore it is good for everyone -- particularly when the Internet is so diverse and when there's a tendency for these practices to become entrenched. It does seem like we often get bogged down in arguments between people of widely varying depths, or between people of very different kinds of expertise. In the first case there is no basis for compromise because the person who is out of his depth doesn't understand the need for compromise or the basis that makes the compromise reasonable. In the second case compromise is difficult because there is little or no common ground. I'm not sure how to resolve either kind of impasse in a reasonable fashion other than by discussion, though this does sometimes get tedious. Yes, I'd like to find a better way. At any rate, it seems difficult to get a compromise before it is clear that people understand the issues associated with a
