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On Thu, 8 Sep 2016, Flavio Percoco wrote:

> To be honest, I think you're expressing in a negative way something
> that was thought in a positive way. The motivation to write the
> principles down is to help the community with the help from the
> community. No one is pushing anyone's beliefs on anyone. The idea to
> write these principles down came out of a retrospective and someone
> actually signed up for the work.

I don't dispute that writing things down is a positive. It is a _huge_
positive. What I'm disputing is the process with which it is happening.

The writing is starting from a detailed proposal which, as txx said in
his response to me above, presents itself as a document that is "meant
to document *existing* principles that we operate under but never
documented properly. It's not really about a new set of rules, or really
changing anything".

That is, it thinks of iself as an existing truth to be ratified.

That would be great except that it is clear from the comments on the
review and comments we've seen on this list and elsewhere that the
truths are not universally held. If that's indeed the case, then we need
to make adjustments to the process and the document to be inclusive and
make greater progress on putting to bed some of the arguments we
continually have, but fail to resolve.

> I do not think the process is trying to push few ppl beliefs on the
> community. Someone had to write something down first, right? Someone
> had to kick this off somehow, right? I hardly believe we could have
> collected a list of principles to reason about out of a mailing list
> thread. These list is just a starting point for us to add/remove stuff
> to it either on follow-up patches or the same one.

As I said in my original posting, again above, and supported by ttx's
response, the current proposal and its mode of presentation
presuppose the principles. That starting point biases any future
discussions. That's problematic if the end goal are principles that
everyone actually understands and agrees.

> As everything else we do in this community, this work is meant to
> evolve and progress but again, we have to start somewhere. With what's
> in that review, I believe it'll be easier for everyone to reason about
> the document and the expectations of it.

I hope we can agree to disagree, cordially. We seem to want the same
positive things to happen, we are disagreeing on the process. I
merely wish there had been more public engagement, sooner, and a
greater sense of doubt and request for assistance in the document.

The truth, for me, is that I agree with most of the things in the
document. What is problematic for me is that I know a lot of people
who will not. Because of the ordering of the process and the
presumption of the document they will simply choose to ignore it and
carry on with whatever other important things they've got going on.

-- 
Chris Dent               ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)        https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent