[tech] the duplo protocol

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 07:42:04AM +0100,
 Petite Abeille <petite.abeille at gmail.com> wrote 
 a message of 26 lines which said:

> The specification is more akin to an animal rights activist
> manifesto than a formal protocol.

Could you be more specific? The specification is not perfect (as the
discussion on IDN and IRI demonstrated) but, as an author of a few
specs and a reader of many more, I can say that it is certainly not
ridiculous. I wrote a client just from it, without reading other
clients' source code, something which is not possible with other
specs.

> Daniel Stenberg couldn't help but laugh at it in its current shape.

Being a reader of the curl mailing list, I don't think it is a good
assessment. Daniel criticized the lack of registration of the scheme
but he mostly criticized actual code (TOFU by default, and the lack of
test cases), not the specification.

> Stephane Bortzmeyer brought up good points about the sorry state of
> affairs of the protocol governance. Don't ignore him.

But I can add that I don't have a ready-made solution. True, I wish
there were a clearer way of discussing, approving and rejecting
changes in the spec, but it is not obvious how to do so. I certainly
don't advocate a formal process ("Gemini Foundation" or "Gemini
Consortium") right now, the Gemini system being too recent an, IMHO,
not done yet.

> People are overwhelmed by all these discussions because the place is
> utter chaos.

Wait until you've been in an IETF working group :-)

> No amount of groupthink will get gemini out of this. A protocol is
> meant to be technical, not poetic..

But a protocol also have goals, and goals are political, not
technical. We already have HTTP, which works fine. If we spend time on
Gemini, it is not because HTTP is technically broken (it is not) but
because we have goals that we find important (simplicity, lightness,
power consumption, reject of tracking, no distractions, etc) and which
are not reachable with HTTP.