From rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Fri Oct 12 10:23:07 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list llg-members); Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:23:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: from rlpowell by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IgOE7-0008Ep-8V for llg-members@lojban.org; Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:23:07 -0700 Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:23:07 -0700 From: Robin Lee Powell To: llg-members@lojban.org Subject: [llg-members] Re: LLG AGM 2007: New Business Message-ID: <20071012172307.GD31644@digitalkingdom.org> Mail-Followup-To: llg-members@lojban.org References: <20070918181955.GW10667@nvg.org> <20071010000942.GZ10376@digitalkingdom.org> <20071011190654.GO13890@digitalkingdom.org> <470E9480.3000307@lojban.org> <20071012022955.GG13890@digitalkingdom.org> <470F688A.2050209@lojban.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <470F688A.2050209@lojban.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.16 (2007-06-11) X-archive-position: 396 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: llg-members-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: llg-members-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Precedence: bulk Reply-to: llg-members@lojban.org X-list: llg-members On Fri, Oct 12, 2007 at 08:28:58AM -0400, Bob LeChevalier wrote: > Robin Lee Powell wrote: >> If you wish me to despair less, you must show me that this >> situation will be resolved in the forseeable future. Telling me >> that I'm missing the point of the BPFK is no good: I already >> know, and I'm very nearly past caring. Telling me you will >> confront me with legalities is no good: it simply increases my >> despair, because if legalities will be used to slow the process >> of something that is already this slow, we will literally never >> finish. Show me another way. Show me something other than the >> future I see before me, which is another 5 years of trying to >> respect the baseline in front of newbies when my own writings use >> xorlo. > > As I understand it, what has been happening is that whenever some > checkpoint becomes contentious, the few people who are paying > attention exhaust themselves in argument without resolving things, > and then everyone goes away until you manage a new push to action. That's fairly correct, yes. > Yet supposedly all we have left are boring sections about which > there are few issues. Why then aren't they getting written > instead of trying to resolve what people are not ready to resolve. Because no-one's actually willing to do the work. > It is the pressure to resolve issues (usually under a time limit, > since they are only raised as part of a checkpoint discussion), > rather than to get the documentation of the status quo done, that > causes the repetitive stagnation. That's a total load of crap. I have offered, multiple times, to let people work on any section they want, regardless of time limit, and send the work to me via e-mail and have me do all the legalistic parts. And don't tell me you don't remember, because I made this offer to you, in person, at the last LogFest. I also sent mail to that effect to all the lists. Not a single person has ever taken me up on this offer. Time limits are irrelevant. Please cease speaking of them; it's making you look bad. > The original intent, as I understood it, was that we were going to > document the baseline as is, and document a set of change > proposals to that baseline If that was the original intent, no-one explained that to me when I took over, and I don't get that out of the BPFK charter. Furthermore, it doesn't help when no-one knows what the current state is, which is regularily the case. > (I had envisioned when byfy was founded that these would be > documented in the manner that we came up with for baseline change > proposals > http://www.lojban.org/publications/formal-grammars/techfix.300 or > some appropriate modification thereof. I will note that nearly > all grammar baseline change proposals that were written up in that > way were adopted without a helluva lot of contention. I don't see how increasing the baroqueness of the documentation is going to help, when almost no-one's writing any, but if you want to write documentation like that, feel free. > If it was entirely unclear what the baseline had to say about an > issue, the checkpoint writer was going to merely do his best to > document usage and whatever CLL had to say, and propose something > that would reflect these, while noting that the issue in question > needs further scrutiny. That is mostly what has been done; see BAI and the lerfu sections. > Anyone who has done software maintenance should know how > configuration management works, and all I've ever proposed is a > version of traditional configuration management of an existing > product. Yes, it is bureaucratic (i.e. heavy on procedures and > paperwork), but by making a procedure bureaucratic it DOES get > done eventually, That's an amazingly powerful assertion. What evidence do you bring to back up this claim? What you've just said is that making something complicated means that people will magically show up to do the work. That's completely ludicrous. > If this had been done from the start, then a long time ago we > should have had, with almost no debate at all, a draft for every > section, and a whole bunch of questions, issues, and change > proposals to be considered, all of which would be decided upon as > changes to the *complete* draft. I'm sorry, but I can't continue this discussion. What you've just said is this: If we added more formalism to the BPFK procedure, people would have done much more work than they actually did, and we'd be done by now. This is not only insulting, it has nothing to do with reality at all. Before I said I was exaggerating a feeling of despair. I am no longer exaggerating. If you are so out of touch with reality that you actually believe that people would have been magically impelled to do work by the presence of more procedural niceties, then you are in a fantasy universe that I cannot reach, and that is horribly depressing. I'm going to go away for a while. Do what you want. -Robin -- Lojban Reason #17: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute - http://singinst.org/ http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/