On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 11:03 AM, Markus Karg <markus.karg_at_gmx.net> wrote:
> Tatu,
>
>> with all due respect -- you certainly care about REST, and have
>> provided lots of information and valid points -- I think that there is
>> some discrepancy with above statement, and some earlier comments.
>
> Yes I think you misunderstood comments. If you like, post what you thought
> to be "invalid" in any sense and I will explain.
It is possible I misunderstood some comments. There has been lots of
related but separate discussions, and my impression was formed from
some combination of these.
My concerns have to do with what someone (maybe Paul) commented as
moving the goal posts -- that is, changes in what was assumed. This is
often tactics used by people who care more about appearing to win
discussions. Based on your comments, you are not such a person, I am
just bit sensitive to appearance of such traits, having had to work
with people that have had the problem.
>> Let's keep discussion honest. And please, let us not try to score
>> points with external parties. I enjoyed Roy's response to question
>> posed -- he is a very knowledgeable person -- but not so much
>> commentary that seemed focused on scoring points (winning the
>> argument), not in resolving open questions.
>
> I do not see what is not honest in the discussion, and the idea of invite
> Roy was to shorten the discussion, not to "win" in any sense. In fact, I
Inviting Roy was fair, I did not mean to imply that was not.
I was feeling follow-up comments were not necessarily appropriate at
least wording (regarding "silly RPC approach" [or something to that
effect]). This felt like framing discussion less objective.
> don't care whether I "win" the discussion or not, because my intension is
> just to keep the JAX-RS API clean and RESTful, not to find exactly my ideas
> implemented or others discarded. The discussion helped me to understand what
> the proposal actually was meant like, and it turned out that some things are
> not so brilliant while others had been just misunderstandings. Ain't that
> the target of a discussion? Ain't it valid and worth to discuss this (if
> not, why did you participate?)?
Ok. Yes, fair enough. I fully agree here.
Maybe my impression was wrong. I hope that future discussions remains
business-like -- which it mostly has so far, I must admit -- and if
so, this is all in the past.
> As you might have not noticed, it was actually Roy that convinced me that I
> was wrong and I agreed meanwhile to many arguments of Marc, Paul, Santiago
> and all the others, so it was worth asking him, as he clearly told the facts
> while the others just wrote their interpretation (see my blog entry why I
> don't care for interpretations but solely for definitions). Also, Roy is not
> an "external", as this is an open forum (didn't know that there is actually
> the possibility that someone could be "external" in this forum at all). It
> is just the most simple solution for a dispute to ask the man who wrote the
> book. What is wrong with that?
I do not feel that others made more interpretations and you less. And
I did read Roy's responses, and consider them to be among good useful
part of discussion. I did notice he did consider headers/body
distinction as less of a semantic issue, which is more in line with
what others were suggesting.
But as to being external, as far as I know, Roy has not been
participant of this mailing list; and so although has was obviously
part of that particular thread, in larger context he is external.
This is not a value assessment (I assume he's working on something
other than JAX-RS-based systems; plus volume here is high) of any
kind, it is just a statement of fact.
So yes, majority of human population would be external to this forum.
No, nothing wrong with inviting people for discussions; it is only
question of how continuing discussions are handled.
Being not privy to preceding discussion, one needs to be careful to
maintain objective tone, in my opinion.
> Cannot see what you think is not honest or what your actually complaint is.
> I wrote the above lines to Paul as a direct reaction to his comments about
> the discussion itself: I respect Paul and actually appreciate him (and he
> knows that), but I dislike the idea that he tells me when or with whom or in
> what depth I am doing discussions in this forum, as long as others find the
> discussion interesting enough to participate, like Jan -or even you- for
> example. I felt actually offended by his comments about the discussion, even
> if he might not wanted to offend me (what I in fact assume), and so I told
> him why I would prefer if he simply skips my postings instead of complaining
> about them, which is a practical solution that does *not* offend me (as I
> don't notice it). Keep the community discussing if it likes to discuss. No
> need to interfere if one doesn't like to.
I don't want to elongate this too much further, but I think that there
are different aspects that co-exist, like:
(a) free discussion is fine per se, but
(b) one needs to be aware of overhead of extra noise
So while I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, my impression is
that many members have indicated that "enough is enough" for rehashing
of parts of discussion, from their part. This is not to say others can
not continue, just that it is becoming distracting to more important
issues.
Everyone has the right to state that they feel discussion has expired;
others are free to consider it or ignore.
We probably agree on most of that. And you have of course every right
not to like what you perceive as patronizing or otherwise unwelcome
tone.
For what it's worth, I took Paul's comments more in spirit of wanting
to focus on core aspects of Jersey project, which is what this list is
primarily about. If community feels differently, such meta-discussion
is relevant of course.
Looking forward to move on,
-+ Tatu +-