Re: [Fwd: CAP-12 - interm version 'A']

["Michael Fair" <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark, thank you for your analysis of the diffs,
this is exactly the kind of thing we were trying
to get Doug to do but he wouldn't.

Bruce was simply saying that a lot has changed and
given Doug's track record of late he has reason to
be suspicious of this many changes in what should have
just been minor changes.

I agree with Bruce.
Very few of us (you being one major exception) have the
time to go through every page of CAP and figure out what
changed from one draft to the next.  Bruce asked Doug
on several occasions to please provide a list, or do a
diff that we could all see so those of us invested in
understanding the draft don't have to reinvest in
reunderstanding the draft from scratch.  Doug told Bruce
to do the diff.  Ultimately, Bruce did the diff and found
the results to be unusable as too many things had changed
and there was no context for the changes.  Without going
through the whole set of changes (as you did) there was
no way for anyone to know what had changed in that rat's
nest.  Doug was wrong about eliminating the double spaces
after sentence periods and rather than just admit that,
he's trying to cover his ass and defend how he's in the
right.  Fine if he misunderstood, admit he misunderstood
and move on.  Doug doesn't do this, hasn't done this,
and the demonstrated propensity by him to defend himself
rather than just admit his fault and move on has been
the damaging source of productivity on the list.

Bruce, myself, and others are tired of fighting with
Doug over what are very reasonable and provable items
and requests.  Doug currently has me on his ignore list
because I demanded he prove his assertions and wouldn't
stop asking him to prove it (he never even made an
attempt to provide such proof, and the evidence against
his position would have continued to mount).  I was sick
and tired of hearing him claim something, but whenever
any of us tried to actually do what he said was possible
and failed, he wouldn't tell us what went wrong.  We were
forced to conclude that nothing went wrong except that
Doug's claims were wrong to begin with.  Trying to get
the answer to the question of whether or not he, or we,
were wrong using reason and documentable evidence has
proven impossible thus far.

All we're looking for in this thread is an organized list
of changes, completion on the known issues raised (which
Doug has not declared as "known" or "raised" but instead
berates those who attempt to get thier official status),
and security in knowing what has changed so that we, as
reviewers and authorizers, can do our self appointed jobs.

If Doug was going to strip out a single space from every
sentence, that should a rev all by itself, should be the
only thing that changes and should take place all at once.
Finally, we should be forewarned its about to happen and
why it's going to happen so we're prepared and can verify
its necessity.  In this case we would have shown the need
for such a change to be inaccurate and we wouldn't even
be having a discussion about it.

Even if it was needed, by being its own rev we would know
that the new rev says the exact same thing the old rev did,
but the whitespace would be all different.  That gives us
security in knowing what we are reviewing.

Then typos and simple ommissions should be listed as just
that, typos and ommisions, and if there are a significant
number of them, make those their own rev as well.  Again,
we keep our confidence in what we are reviewing.  Knowing
that only simple fixes to what was already there were the
only things that changed.  We should also be given an
expectation as too how many of these we should expect.
This way if expect 550 of them, and the diff says something
similar then we can be confident that's all that what was done.

By doing this, when we start actually adding and deleting
text, a simple diff makes those changes apparent and they
aren't going to get confused with the simple typos.  Having
a dozen or even more typos and ommisions corrected is fine,
we can wade through those, but certainly not hundreds of them.

Doug did all of the above arbitrarily, all at once, and won't
tell us what he did.  That's where we have a problem.  We are
left with zero confidence that what we had before is still the
same document.  So the simple way to restore confidence is to
have the editor tell us what was done.  The editor in question
(Doug) won't do that.  So people like Pat and yourself and
others have to take out their own time to duplicate the effort
of finding out what the heck Doug did so that we can restore
our confidence in knowing what we are editing.  This confidence
is extremely important, now even more so, that we've recently
just gone through a painful 2 months of debate over things that
iTIP should never have had in it to begin with.  iTIP didn't
go through the proper scrutiny before being last called and
we've wasted weeks worth of man hours trying to clean up the
mess on this list alone (not too mention anyone who actually
tries to implement the draft).


> Conclusions (based on your 707 number):
>   About 118 changes that if done incorrectly would effect the protocol
>   And Bruce does not comment on or care about on this list.

Thanks, now all we need to do is figure how to separate these
188 from the other 589.

>   And about 589 changes that Bruce seems to focus on that have no
>   effect on the protocol. Again, get a life!

We have lives - which is why going through 589 changes of which
none of them are important is considered a waste of our time.



> > If you honestly believe there were "thousands" of typos
> > and grammar changes then I have some land to sell you...
>
> Yet another dishonest (sorry Pat, it is a lie. Enthusiasm is for
> children)
> statement from Bruce. Doug said "thousands WG and private emails" not
> thousands of typos. Now who is the one trying to mislead this list?

If you believe that Doug has actually received thousands of
emails about this between Cap-10 and now then I have some
land to sell you...

Wading through 589 typo-class changes out of 700+, in our
resource limited time frames is not a reasonable request.

Also, if Doug were on the reverse end of this deal and he
was committed to having confidence that he knew what he
was reviewing and what had changed and the editor seemed
to be trying to skim over important issues in favor of
getting CAP last called I'm sure he'd feel the same way.
If he didn't then he didn't have a resource limited time
frame, or at least doesn't have any respect from whoever
he has to steal time from in order to wade through them.

-- Michael --