Subject: [lisp] Lisp WG concerns

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:25:56 +0300

A couple of weeks ago, several people complained to me that the 
discussions in the Lisp WG were unhealthy in various ways: not enough 
progress was made, too much weight was put on one or the other side of 
an issue, the other side was being unreasonable, various people were 
misbehaving, and so on.

I have finally completed my review of everything that has been going on 
in list and talked to various people. Apologies for taking so long, but 
I had a lot of backlog. In any case, in my opinion I saw no serious 
misbehavior or other grave problems. The positive spin of the WG's state 
is that you have a very active discussion, many implementors from 
different teams, and momentum to move forward. That being said, there 
are also problems:

Human issues: Some of the discussion has a confrontational tone, often 
needlessly. Not everyone is taking time to explain how they arrived to 
their conclusion. There is no "we" feeling in the group making 
decisions. Discussions move to form (format and split of issues) or 
process from the substance. Its hard to gauge consensus when the 
participants belong to just few interest groups (even if there are many 
key participants).

Legitimate conflicts: Some of the interested groups and implementation 
teams are thinking about very different deployment situations and 
implementation strategies, which creates conflicts about whose 
priorities are honored first. Existing RFCs cause pain for tunnel 
implementations and relaxing the requirements might cause other types of 
pain. (And revising those RFCs seems to generate some unnecessary fear 
for what should be our daily business.)

Technical issues: While much of the basics are pretty clear, there are 
also areas that probably need a lot more work, like security.

Darrell and Sam are already tackling much of this. I will just bring up 
a couple of high level points that I hope everyone in the group 
understands. We are here to work on an *IETF version of Lisp*, and we do 
that because we believe that the joint expertise from everyone in the 
group will create a better result than if someone just did the protocol 
on their own. But that necessarily implies the need to take the other 
people's opinions in account. The Lisp RFCs *will* be different from the 
initial drafts. There can be no single man's IETF Lisp. This is the set 
of people you have, and all of you are seriously interested in Lisp. You 
*have to find a compromise* that all parties can live with to publish a 
spec. I believe the end result will actually be better that way.

I would also like to plea for the following:

1) Be respectful in the discussions

2) Decisions are made based on justifications that are brought up on the 
list. Be aware that many of the original design decisions are probably 
questioned in this process, and that's as it should be. You may have to 
live with a decision or two that you believe is wrong.

3) Try to keep the discussion on the substance. If the form is wrong, 
its not necessarily because the other guy is evil.

4) Lisp is not the only component of the Internet, and I expect Lisp to 
play by the rules of the rest of the system. Sometimes there's a bug in 
the rest of the system, but it is possible -- and often easy -- to fix 
those. That is why we are doing the work in 6MAN. And sometimes 
something in Lisp will be harder because the rest of the system cannot 
accommodate the best possible solution for you. Live with it.

Jari