CLL 1.1/ CLL 2.0. What is your opinion in the current situation?

[la gleki]

There are two possible scenarios.

1. We wait until someone finishes CLL 1.1 published on http://github.com/dag/cll

2. We start writing CLL 2.0 now and only then convert it to a publishable format

Now what are advantages and disadvantages ?

1. Advantages:

a. We get a printable book and the LLG can publish it and get some money.

2. Advantages: 

a. We develop the language much more quickly, solve unsettled issues and then publish this renewed CLL which will be enthusiastically accepted by the world community zo'oru'e

My personal opinion is that if the CLL 1.1 can be completed within a year or so then I'd certainly accepted scenario #1.

But let's face it: it's not been developed for more than 5 months now.

And if we start writing CLL 2.0 now in a wiki we can include special tags that would be ignored by the wiki rendering engine but used later when we export it to DocBook or whatever.

So now I wanna hear your opinions.

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 06:39:37AM -0800, la gleki wrote:
> There are two possible scenarios.
>
> 1. We wait until someone finishes CLL 1.1 published on
> http://github.com/dag/cll
>
> 2. We start writing CLL 2.0 now and only then convert it to a publishable
> format

Who the hell is "we"? What do "we" intend to change, exactly?

-Robin

[Jonathan Jones]

And who ever said anything about a version 2.0?
 

-Robin

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[la gleki]

We are the community, those that would like to advance lojban to a finished state.

We are the ones who want to have an new official baseline that incorporates all the BPFK's work 

 

-Robin

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 04:46:32AM -0800, la gleki wrote:
>
>
> On Friday, November 16, 2012 8:49:14 PM UTC+4, Robin Powell wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 06:39:37AM -0800, la gleki wrote:
> > > There are two possible scenarios.
> > >
> > > 1. We wait until someone finishes CLL 1.1 published on
> > > http://github.com/dag/cll
> > >
> > > 2. We start writing CLL 2.0 now and only then convert it to a
> > > publishable format
> >
> > Who the hell is "we"? What do "we" intend to change, exactly?
> >
>
> We are the community, those that would like to advance lojban to a
> finished state.

Really? Because I've been begging for help for something like 5
years, in a wide variety of endeavours, and mostly gotten nothing.

But if you want to go write some detailed modifications to the
current CLL, you should feel free, and if they're any good I'll use
them. Just don't make it look official.

-Robin

[la gleki]

Who else can currently develop it, even if not for free?

-Robin

[Robin Lee Powell]

There are probably 20 people on this list with most or all of the
requisite skills. No idea which if them would take money for it;
I've offered, and gotten no reply.

-Robin

--
http://singinst.org/ : Our last, best hope for a fantastic future.
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lu no'e go'i li'u .e lu to'e go'i li'u .e lu lo mamta be do cu sofybakni li'u

[selpa'i]

Am 18.11.2012 19:48, schrieb Robin Lee Powell:
> There are probably 20 people on this list with most or all of the
> requisite skills. No idea which if them would take money for it;
> I've offered, and gotten no reply.

Is anyone currently working on it?

I can understand gleki's frustration, and I can also understand yours. I
don't really understand how so many people just prefer to watch
passively what happens. The BPFK has done a lot of great work already,
it's a shame it completely ran out of steam.

I don't think a single person alone can get much done, and I also doubt
that anyone would want a single person to make all their decisions for
them, especially in a language as Lojban, where we still have a
considerable amount of things that must be discussed before they can
become official. Don't people want to have a say in it? If yes, then
they must speak up, offer their help, get involved or else they must
accept that they can't complain about any decisions that are being made
without them.

What is the community's general opinion about the current state of
affairs? Are people generally happy to wait and stay in this gray area
between old and new Lojban?

We get lots of newbies on IRC and each one of them reminds us of the
fact that we don't have a single up-do-date, official description of our
language. We have to tell each time that they can learn from the CLL or
Lojban for Beginners, but that there are several outdated things in
those materials. Is it not in everyone's interest that people new to the
language get welcomed by proper learning materials?

There are countless cases of dicussions, both on this list and on IRC
about issues that some people believe are already solved but which
others believe are unsettled. There is lots of mutual disagreement and
even more confusion and obscurity because there is such a huge contrast
between old and new cmavo definitions, for instance.

This is just a report of the current situation the way I experience it.
Mainly, I'm confused about people's motivations.

I know that some years ago, some people agreed to make you (rlpowell)
the Benevolent Dictator, but what were they thinking? Did they just want
to free themselves of any responsibilities? A single person can in no
way do all of this without getting overwhelmed, and it seems that is
exactly what has happened.

What do people think about this now?

I'm not sure what the best solution is, or what step must be taken next.
All I'm seeing is that we're stuck. In my opinion, we (and by "we" I
mean everyone who wants to participate) should make sure that the
docbook project gets finished as soon as possible and then we must
immediately reactivate the BPFK.

If there are, as you say, 20 people on this list that could help with
the docbook project, then those people are urged to speak up. We need
you! If you haven't yet noticed, some of us are desperate enough to pay
you for this job.

For what it's worth, gleki is talking about CLL2.0 because he's doubting
that there will ever be a completed CLL1.1 at this rate and he considers
the CLL1.1 relatively useless because it would still be outdated, which
is true, of course. xorlo and dotside are by far not the only changes.

He and I were merely wondering how to move Lojban forward. One idea was
to give up on CLL1.1 and get straight to the actual CLL2.0 that
incorporates *every* change, not just xorlo and dotside. I told him that
this is not an easy thing to do because we must discuss these changes
together as a community, no single person has the right to make changes
without the approval of at least some notable Lojbanists.

When I told you about this idea some time ago, you made it very clear to
me that it would be a terrible idea to start already so I did nothing
about it. The only way for this to be a useful idea is to have enough
people of the old BPFK team coming together and finishing off the
remaining issues (of which there are of course quite a few). Then, to
create the actual CLL, all we need to do is get the old CLL on a wiki
and make changes to it accordingly. Everyone who understands what
they're doing can help at that point. Then once all the changes have
been worked in, a team will read over everything and double and triple
check. And probably some final dicussions will ensue, but the goal will
be near by then. That's my vision anyway.

I've probably written enough now; those are my
spontaneously-written-down but for-some-time-had thoughts, no more and
no less. If anyone has anything useful to say, please do so.

mu'o mi'e la selpa'i

--
pilno zo le xu .i lo dei bangu cu se cmene zo lojbo .e nai zo lejbo

doị mèlbi mlenì'u
.i do càtlu ki'u
ma fe la xàmpre ŭu
.i do tìnsa càrmi
gi'e sìrji se tàrmi
.i taị bo pu cìtka lo gràna ku


.


.

[And Rosta]

selpa'i, On 18/11/2012 19:30:

> The only way for this to be a useful idea is to have enough people of
> the old BPFK team coming together and finishing off the remaining
> issues (of which there are of course quite a few).

Why the old BPFK team? There seem to be active newcomers such as you and Jacob Errington who understand the issues and would have been on the BPFK had you been around ten years ago. I was on the original BPFK team, but nowadays I wouldn't have the time or commitment to do more than vote on already worked-out proposals -- i.e. not for working-out and debating proposals. Far better chances of progress if the job is given to the likes of you and Jacob. (I should add that I have no idea who either of you are; I just observe that you both post clueful messages to Lojban list.)

--And.

[selpa'i]

You're right, of course it would have to be a team of active members,
but we don't need to create a new "taskforce", we can still call them
the BPFK, just with a different list of people. I am hoping at least
some of the old members are still available and willing to help out. We
need people like xorxes.

I certainly want to be on the BPFK team (or on whatever team that makes
decisions together) and I asked rlpowell if I could become a member some
time ago, but he told me there was no use in that, since it was
basically a dead committee.

[Jonathan Jones]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:30 PM, selpa'i <sel...@gmx.de> wrote:

Am 18.11.2012 19:48, schrieb Robin Lee Powell:

There are probably 20 people on this list with most or all of the
requisite skills.  No idea which if them would take money for it;
I've offered, and gotten no reply.

Is anyone currently working on it?

No. the last commit was on Aug 12. I haven't personally been working on it, with the excuse that I've got school stuff right now.
 

I can understand gleki's frustration, and I can also understand yours. I don't really understand how so many people just prefer to watch passively what happens. The BPFK has done a lot of great work already, it's a shame it completely ran out of steam.

I don't think the BPFK has run out of steam per se. I'll note that the BPFK mailing list is apparently dead, and it's members as a whole don't do much, but the /job/ of the BPFK is still getting done, by those of us that care about whatever issue we're bringing up to discuss. Problems are being found, opinions are being floated, decisions are being made. Granted, this is all being done by people that aren't in the BPFK, but it is what the job of the BPFK is, as far as I am aware, at any rate.

At some point in the past, not long after Robin became the BDFL, a message was sent out on the BPFK list which basically stated, "If you're reading this you /are/ the BPFK". Before that time, being on the list only meant you were privy to the discussions on it, not necessarily that you were a member. After that message, it was clear- to me, at any rate- that being a member of the BPFK required exactly one thing- wanting to do the job.

Speaking of, I think that anyone who wants to get issues solved and changes made, should apply to join the BPFK list and start talking on it. The entire reason for the existence of that list is to discuss issues and make decisions.

Going off on a rant for a second here, I've noticed that pretty much /none/ of the lojban lists is being used according to its purpose, with the exception of the newbie list and possibly the non-English ones to which I am not a member.

To whit: The groups I am a member of and their intended purpose:

Lojban Beginners : The list for nintadni to ask questions and get help.
xedbig : A list for talking about anything, in Lojban /only/. (Haven't seen anything from here in a long time.)
lojban : A list for talking about Lojbanic stuff (in English or preferably Lojban), specifically culturally related, such as Lojbanic idioms for an example.
jbofanva : The list for translation projects. I.e.: If you want to translate something (like, say, something in a theatre project) from language X to Lojban, this is place to do it.
BPFK : The list for discussing issues of the Lojban language, as in poorly defined words, missing concepts, and anything else specific to the language itself. (This includes things like the CLL and jbovlaste)

It seems to me that all of these things, with the exception of beginner questions, have all been mashed into the main Lojban list, which pretty much defeats the purpose of having any of the others and clutters up this one with things that really belong somewhere else.

Just my two cents. I'd like to see these lists actually being used for their intended purposes, and nothing more.

 

I don't think a single person alone can get much done, and I also doubt that anyone would want a single person to make all their decisions for them, especially in a language as Lojban, where we still have a considerable amount of things that must be discussed before they can become official. Don't people want to have a say in it? If yes, then they must speak up, offer their help, get involved or else they must accept that they can't complain about any decisions that are being made without them.

What is the community's general opinion about the current state of affairs? Are people generally happy to wait and stay in this gray area between old and new Lojban?

If I were to guess, I'd say most people are to busy learning and using Lojban to spend any time on the decision making, issue discussion bits. I doubt anyone is "happy" with the current state of affairs, but I think most people don't care enough to do anything about it, and it falls to those of us that do to, well, do it.
 

We get lots of newbies on IRC and each one of them reminds us of the fact that we don't have a single up-do-date, official description of our language. We have to tell each time that they can learn from the CLL or Lojban for Beginners, but that there are several outdated things in those materials. Is it not in everyone's interest that people new to the language get welcomed by proper learning materials?

Of course it is. That's why it's so important that the CLL1.1 is finished. The big thing about CLL1.1 is that one of its design parameters is making it easier to maintain and update than the original CLL, so that keeping it up to date with any changes to the language is simple and relatively painless. The other major point is that it be easy to deliver in a variety of formats, so that the same source can be used to automagically generate a web site, pdf, print book, etc. etc.
 

There are countless cases of dicussions, both on this list and on IRC about issues that some people believe are already solved but which others believe are unsettled. There is lots of mutual disagreement and even more confusion and obscurity because there is such a huge contrast between old and new cmavo definitions, for instance.

This is just a report of the current situation the way I experience it. Mainly, I'm confused about people's motivations.

I know that some years ago, some people agreed to make you (rlpowell) the Benevolent Dictator, but what were they thinking? Did they just want to free themselves of any responsibilities? A single person can in no way do all of this without getting overwhelmed, and it seems that is exactly what has happened.

We didn't so much as agree to it as he decided to do it and we let him. I remember his reasoning behind it being that the then-current state wherein the completely inactive BPFK wasn't doing it's job, and so he decided to take over their job just so that /something/ would get done. We let him do it mainly because the vast majority of us felt the same way- the stuff needs done, someone needs to do it, this guy's willing to, so let him.
 

What do people think about this now?

I'm still in total support of this. It's very much like the U.S.A. system of government in some respects, where those of us who give a crap about one issue or another discuss it, debate it, argue about it, and so on until we've figured out what we think is the best solution for it, and then Robin decides whether or not to veto our solution. More often than not he agrees, and to the best of my knowledge he never exercises his decision-making power without being fully informed.
 

I'm not sure what the best solution is, or what step must be taken next. All I'm seeing is that we're stuck. In my opinion, we (and by "we" I mean everyone who wants to participate) should make sure that the docbook project gets finished as soon as possible and then we must immediately reactivate the BPFK.

If there are, as you say, 20 people on this list that could help with the docbook project, then those people are urged to speak up. We need you! If you haven't yet noticed, some of us are desperate enough to pay you for this job.

For what it's worth, gleki is talking about CLL2.0 because he's doubting that there will ever be a completed CLL1.1 at this rate and he considers the CLL1.1 relatively useless because it would still be outdated, which is true, of course. xorlo and dotside are by far not the only changes.

My understanding of CLL1.1 isn't merely an update of the CLL to include dotside and xorlo- although obviously it is supposed to do that-  but an upgrade from 1.0 to a rolling distrubution style, thus making any future changes much easier to make, meaning that there will never be a need for a "CLL2.0", since once 1.1 is finished, any needed changes to the content of the CLL will be git-style revisions, rather than a whole re-write of the entire book.
 

He and I were merely wondering how to move Lojban forward. One idea was to give up on CLL1.1 and get straight to the actual CLL2.0 that incorporates *every* change, not just xorlo and dotside. I told him that this is not an easy thing to do because we must discuss these changes together as a community, no single person has the right to make changes without the approval of at least some notable Lojbanists.

When I told you about this idea some time ago, you made it very clear to me that it would be a terrible idea to start already so I did nothing about it. The only way for this to be a useful idea is to have enough people of the old BPFK team coming together and finishing off the remaining issues (of which there are of course quite a few). Then, to create the actual CLL, all we need to do is get the old CLL on a wiki and make changes to it accordingly. Everyone who understands what they're doing can help at that point. Then once all the changes have been worked in, a team will read over everything and double and triple check. And probably some final dicussions will ensue, but the goal will be near by then. That's my vision anyway.

I don't think a wiki is the appropriate format for the CLL. For one thing, changes should only be made to the CLL when they have officially been decided on, which means only select few people should have write access, not everyone and their dog. For another, a wiki isn't easily converted into other delivery modes, AFAIK, and the deisre is for the CLL to be available as /at least/ a web site, a pdf, and a print book, which is why CLL1.1 is being encoded in LaTeX and hosted in a git repository: being in LaTeX makes it easy to print the same material in a large variety of formats, including but not limited to the ones I've mentioned, and being in a git repo makes it very easy to submit changes to the CLL on an as needed basis.
 

I've probably written enough now; those are my spontaneously-written-down but for-some-time-had thoughts, no more and no less. If anyone has anything useful to say, please do so.

mu'o mi'e la selpa'i

--
pilno zo le xu .i lo dei bangu cu se cmene zo lojbo .e nai zo lejbo

doị mèlbi mlenì'u
   .i do càtlu ki'u
ma fe la xàmpre ŭu
   .i do tìnsa càrmi
gi'e sìrji se tàrmi
   .i taị bo pu cìtka lo gràna ku


.

.

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[.alyn.post.]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 01:58:31PM -0700, Jonathan Jones wrote:
> [snip] which is why

> CLL1.1 is being encoded in LaTeX and hosted in a git repository: being in
> LaTeX makes it easy to print the same material in a large variety of
> formats, including but not limited to the ones I've mentioned, and being
> in a git repo makes it very easy to submit changes to the CLL on an as
> needed basis.

A minor technical point, not detracting from your main point:

CLL1.1 is written in docbook. The print version of CLL1.1 converts
the logical docbook format into LaTeX typesetting commands. One
unresolved issue for CLL1.1 is that this conversion does not
produce an acceptable result and needs to be tweaked and fixed.

My impression is that this is the #1 item on the todo list, but
in that I could be mistaken.

mi'e .alyn.
--
.i ma'a lo bradi cu penmi gi'e du

[John E Clifford]

---

Time for the once a decade Jeremiad?

1.  The perfect is the mortal enemy of the good.  Are you sure Lojban needs more fixing (or even all it seems to have gotten)?  Do you have a clear idea what Lojban is supposed to do and have you really tried to do these things with it?  (A large part of what I see every day, aside from new words, are reinventing the wheel without looking at the wheels already turning. I know what lacks I see and know how to fix them fairly easily -- and backward compatibly -- but the next problem gets in the way).

2.  Who has the authority to make a reasonably final decision on what is a real problem and what is a solution?  A person?  a group?  the community (how polled?)?  Will everybody (anybody) heed?  Most proposed problems gets solved (several times) fairly quickly, then forgotten until (and even after) they come up again.  So, where is the record of problems raised and solutions accepted (note: the searchable archives have proven fairly ineffective for this)?  And who maintains it, if anyone?

3.  [Expanding on 1]  While learning the mechanics of Lojban, no real effort has been made to teach Lojbanism, the philosophy (as it were, and in a good sense) behind the language.  No one is taken in for long by the older saw about testing the Whorf Hypothesis and the bit about thinking logically doesn't last much longer (if as long, come to think of it).  So people bring all sorts of ideas or ideals to Lojban and, when it does immediately deal with them, either quit in disgust or try to fix it, never noting that what they are out to do is nothing something Lojban was out to do.  So many problems are presented and taken seriously that are just beside the point, but are indistinguishable in their fervor from central ones.

4.  While anybody may have a good idea and no one should be censored, some people have track records that entitle their views to a more careful consideration that Joe Newby's -- even though Joe may eventually turn out to be right.  This is a difficult balancing act but an essential one if progress is not to be constantly diverted by pseudoproblems  or wild-eyed (in retrospect) theories. 

5.  Enough of Lojban is settled syntactically and semantically to do as a functioning language for 99% of the purposes one might have in mind (much more so than, say, English).  More time might be spent on getting some decent teaching aids going at all level (not to disparage what there are, but more and more diverse ones are needed).  Prolix Lojban is difficult mainly because of its vocabulary, which has traditionally been ram-fed, rather than in the modern traditional way.  But as Pimsleur and the like show, you can get a long way with a hundred words and the basic grammar (both of which are much simpler in Lojban than in French or -- God help us -- English).  If you come to a problem, you can look it up or play around a bit -- getting the message across even if the Lojban is a bit iffy.  (Toki pona, with 120 words, give or take, and a half-page grammar, has managed to say just about everything anyone has tried to day so far and has managed to be understood at least as well as my French.)

6.  Lojban probably isn/t your life, but work at it proportionally to your sense of commitment.

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 09:54:09PM +0100, selpa'i wrote:
> Am 18.11.2012 21:21, schrieb And Rosta:
> >selpa'i, On 18/11/2012 19:30:
> >>The only way for this to be a useful idea is to have enough
> >>people of the old BPFK team coming together and finishing off
> >>the remaining issues (of which there are of course quite a few).
> >
> >Why the old BPFK team? There seem to be active newcomers such as
> >you and Jacob Errington who understand the issues and would have
> >been on the BPFK had you been around ten years ago. I was on the
> >original BPFK team, but nowadays I wouldn't have the time or
> >commitment to do more than vote on already worked-out proposals
> >-- i.e. not for working-out and debating proposals. Far better
> >chances of progress if the job is given to the likes of you and
> >Jacob. (I should add that I have no idea who either of you are; I
> >just observe that you both post clueful messages to Lojban list.)
>
> You're right, of course it would have to be a team of active
> members, but we don't need to create a new "taskforce", we can
> still call them the BPFK, just with a different list of people. I
> am hoping at least some of the old members are still available and
> willing to help out. We need people like xorxes.
>
> I certainly want to be on the BPFK team (or on whatever team that
> makes decisions together) and I asked rlpowell if I could become a
> member some time ago, but he told me there was no use in that,
> since it was basically a dead committee.

I'm sorry, I'm really not following this thread properly. I'm
really very overwhelmed right now. It would be good if people
pinged me on IRC for bits that need my person attention (although if
you want to just ignore me and form your own group or whatever,
that'd be fine too :D )

The issue with the BPFK is that many, many decisions have been made
amongst those who know enough and care enough to try to fix the
rough edges in Lojban. Many things have been worked out thoroughly
and are essentially done.

The problem is that no-one is working on *implementing* them.

We don't have a lack of ideas, we have a lack of execution. In that
sense, it's dead.

-Robin

[selpa'i]

.i la'o gy. Robin Lee Powell .gy cusku di'e

> I'm sorry, I'm really not following this thread properly. I'm
> really very overwhelmed right now. It would be good if people
> pinged me on IRC for bits that need my person attention (although if
> you want to just ignore me and form your own group or whatever,
> that'd be fine too :D )

I know you're very busy. However, I think this thread or the questions
to which it pertains is of importance to you as well, even if you're
sick of it. I'll ping you on IRC then, again.

> The issue with the BPFK is that many, many decisions have been made
> amongst those who know enough and care enough to try to fix the
> rough edges in Lojban. Many things have been worked out thoroughly
> and are essentially done.

Many but not all. But yes, it just needs to be finished.

> The problem is that no-one is working on *implementing* them.

But didn't you say that right now is not the time to implement them? You
told me to wait for the finished docbook before doing anything.

> We don't have a lack of ideas, we have a lack of execution. In that
> sense, it's dead.

Again, I'm not sure we have your permission to execute. It feels like
we're hanging in the balance.

[selpa'i]

.i la .aionys. cu cusku di'e

> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:30 PM, selpa'i <sel...@gmx.de
> <mailto:sel...@gmx.de>> wrote:
>
> Am 18.11.2012 19:48, schrieb Robin Lee Powell:
>
> There are probably 20 people on this list with most or all of the
> requisite skills. No idea which if them would take money for it;
> I've offered, and gotten no reply.
>
>
> Is anyone currently working on it?
>
>
> No. the last commit was on Aug 12. I haven't personally been working on
> it, with the excuse that I've got school stuff right now.
>
> I can understand gleki's frustration, and I can also understand
> yours. I don't really understand how so many people just prefer to
> watch passively what happens. The BPFK has done a lot of great work
> already, it's a shame it completely ran out of steam.
>
>
> I don't think the BPFK has run out of steam per se. I'll note that the
> BPFK mailing list is apparently dead, and it's members as a whole don't
> do much, but the /job/ of the BPFK is still getting done, by those of us
> that care about whatever issue we're bringing up to discuss. Problems
> are being found, opinions are being floated, decisions are being made.

Actually, decisions aren't really being made. Most discussions just end
in dead silence, nothing ever gets announced as an official solution,
and almost nothing gets a note on the tiki.

> Speaking of, I think that anyone who wants to get issues solved and
> changes made, should apply to join the BPFK list and start talking on
> it. The entire reason for the existence of that list is to discuss
> issues and make decisions.

Not sure if that's (still) true. We could give it a try, of course.

> If I were to guess, I'd say most people are to busy learning and using
> Lojban to spend any time on the decision making, issue discussion bits.

People are busy *using* Lojban? Who? Where? It is true that many are
struggling with learning it.

> We get lots of newbies on IRC and each one of them reminds us of the
> fact that we don't have a single up-do-date, official description of
> our language. We have to tell each time that they can learn from the
> CLL or Lojban for Beginners, but that there are several outdated
> things in those materials. Is it not in everyone's interest that
> people new to the language get welcomed by proper learning materials?
>
>
> Of course it is. That's why it's so important that the CLL1.1 is
> finished. The big thing about CLL1.1 is that one of its design
> parameters is making it easier to maintain and update than the original
> CLL, so that keeping it up to date with any changes to the language is
> simple and relatively painless. The other major point is that it be easy
> to deliver in a variety of formats, so that the same source can be used
> to automagically generate a web site, pdf, print book, etc. etc.

Yes, very useful and desirable. I again welcome anyone who is willing to
help to speak up and accept our money.

>
> What do people think about this now?
>
>
> I'm still in total support of this. It's very much like the U.S.A.
> system of government in some respects, where those of us who give a crap
> about one issue or another discuss it, debate it, argue about it, and so
> on until we've figured out what we think is the best solution for it,
> and then Robin decides whether or not to veto our solution. More often
> than not he agrees, and to the best of my knowledge he never exercises
> his decision-making power without being fully informed.

I agree. However I think it's too much to ask of one person. And now he
is a father and understandably very very short on time and energy. Maybe
new circumstances require new methods.

> I don't think a wiki is the appropriate format for the CLL. For one
> thing, changes should only be made to the CLL when they have officially
> been decided on, which means only select few people should have write
> access, not everyone and their dog.

Of course not, but it's not likely that "anyone's dog" will make use of
write access. We don't usually have many volunteers for anything. I
expect that only those that really want to help would help.

> For another, a wiki isn't easily
> converted into other delivery modes, AFAIK, and the deisre is for the
> CLL to be available as /at least/ a web site, a pdf, and a print book,
> which is why CLL1.1 is being encoded in LaTeX and hosted in a git
> repository: being in LaTeX makes it easy to print the same material in a
> large variety of formats, including but not limited to the ones I've
> mentioned, and being in a git repo makes it very easy to submit changes
> to the CLL on an as needed basis.

Yes, but the point of the wiki would be to. One could also use google
docs instead. Just something that allows multiple people to put together
a written description in one place for the future CLL. Once the text(s)
are good and complete, they would be transferred to the docbook, which
maybe by then is ready for it. It's just an idea.

[entot]

On Monday, November 19, 2012 9:12:09 PM UTC+9, selpa'i wrote:

> Of course it is. That's why it's so important that the CLL1.1 is

> finished. [snip]

Yes, very useful and desirable. I again welcome anyone who is willing to
help to speak up and accept our money.

I'm willing to help without any money. I'm satisfied with just having my name on the contributors list, so give me any only if you run out of people who accepts money.

I can use about up to 8 hours per week. Also there's an upcoming month-long vacation around December, which will allow me to spend about 24 hours per week.

Several months ago, I went as far as setting up a local build environment, but wasn't motivated enough to read through the TODO file then.

Is there a goal statement for CLL1.1 which I can evaluate my (our) work against? Something like "be able to produce the book in .pdf, .mobi, .epub, .html (chunked, not-chunked) with a readable layout"?

mu'o

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 12:59:45PM +0100, selpa'i wrote:
> .i la'o gy. Robin Lee Powell .gy cusku di'e
>

> >The issue with the BPFK is that many, many decisions have been
> >made amongst those who know enough and care enough to try to fix
> >the rough edges in Lojban. Many things have been worked out
> >thoroughly and are essentially done.
>
> Many but not all. But yes, it just needs to be finished.
>
> >The problem is that no-one is working on *implementing* them.
>
> But didn't you say that right now is not the time to implement
> them? You told me to wait for the finished docbook before doing
> anything.

The docbook *is* implementing them.

In the context of Lojban, implementing a change means updating the
language documentation to match the change; that's primarily the
CLL. Without the docbook, we have no effective way to produce a
new printed version of the CLL wiht said changes in it.

> >We don't have a lack of ideas, we have a lack of execution. In
> >that sense, it's dead.
>
> Again, I'm not sure we have your permission to execute. It feels
> like we're hanging in the balance.

I've *begged* for help with the docbook. This community is full of
technical who either can help right out of the gate or could learn
to help. I'm not sure what more permission you need?

If you (you, personally, I mean, because you think shit through)
want to work on CLL change proposals in advance of the docbook being
complete, that's fine, but until we have something that we can send
to a printer, the language isn't updated as far as I am concerned.

-Robin

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 01:12:05PM +0100, selpa'i wrote:
> .i la .aionys. cu cusku di'e
>

> >If I were to guess, I'd say most people are to busy learning and
> >using Lojban to spend any time on the decision making, issue
> >discussion bits.
>
> People are busy *using* Lojban? Who? Where? It is true that many
> are struggling with learning it.

Well, IRC, for one, as you're well aware. :)

-Robin

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 10:43:54AM -0800, entot wrote:
> On Monday, November 19, 2012 9:12:09 PM UTC+9, selpa'i wrote:
>
> > > Of course it is. That's why it's so important that the CLL1.1
> > > is finished. [snip]
> >
> > Yes, very useful and desirable. I again welcome anyone who is
> > willing to help to speak up and accept our money.
> >
>
> I'm willing to help without any money. I'm satisfied with just
> having my name on the contributors list, so give me any only if
> you run out of people who accepts money.
>
> I can use about up to 8 hours per week. Also there's an upcoming
> month-long vacation around December, which will allow me to spend
> about 24 hours per week.
>
> Several months ago, I went as far as setting up a local build
> environment, but wasn't motivated enough to read through the TODO
> file then.

I *strongly* reccomend getting an account on vrici (one of my shell
servers) rather than trying to set it up yourself; it's just a bear
to get working properly. Come find me on IRC and I can hook you up.

> Is there a goal statement for CLL1.1 which I can evaluate my (our)
> work against? Something like "be able to produce the book in .pdf,
> .mobi, .epub, .html (chunked, not-chunked) with a readable
> layout"?

*Exactly* that. Exactly what you said, without alteration. The
only clarification I'd make is importance: PDF > HTML > everything
else. Oh, and that the PDF needs to be something we can send to a
printer to make a book out of, so (in particular) cross references
need to be page number based (which is why we can't just print the
HTML, or anything converted from it; I haven't found anything that
produces page number xrefs from html, much as I'd *LOVE* to solve
the whole thing that way).

-Robin

[.alyn.post.]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 10:52:10AM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> I *strongly* reccomend getting an account on vrici (one of my shell
> servers) rather than trying to set it up yourself; it's just a bear
> to get working properly. Come find me on IRC and I can hook you up.
>

Whoa. Honestly didn't know about this option. Installing docbook
stuff is way too much work for me to do anywhere but a custom
virtual machine that I can hose when I fsck it up or get tired of
the mountain of dependencies. I'm rarely keen to do such a thing.

[selpa'i]

.i la entot cu cusku di'e

> I'm willing to help without any money. I'm satisfied with just having my
> name on the contributors list, so give me any only if you run out of
> people who accepts money.
>
> I can use about up to 8 hours per week. Also there's an upcoming
> month-long vacation around December, which will allow me to spend about
> 24 hours per week.

I would be very grateful indeed if you could use some of that time to
move this project forward.

[Robin Lee Powell]

Yeah, it's not just docbook. Actually, the docbook is fairly easy;
it's the LaTeX stack wiht full working unicode support that took me
like a week of work at one point.

Anyways, yes, on vrici running "make" in the CLL git dir Just Works
(tm). You already have an account there. :)

-Robin

[.alyn.post.]

I do keep a full texlive install around, as I muck around in TeX a
fair bit. Never tried making it go with docbook or unicode, so no
idea what kind of magic that entailed.

[And Rosta]

Robin Lee Powell, On 19/11/2012 18:52:

> Oh, and that the PDF needs to be something we can send to a
> printer to make a book out of, so (in particular) cross references
> need to be page number based (which is why we can't just print the
> HTML, or anything converted from it; I haven't found anything that
> produces page number xrefs from html, much as I'd *LOVE* to solve
> the whole thing that way).

If the book's subsections are sufficiently short, wouldn't cross-references to subsections, rather than to page numbers, suffice? Many academic books do work thus.

--And.

[Robin Lee Powell]

Well, you've got a copy of the red book, what do you think? :)

Can you show me such a book? I've never seen that. Maybe something
on Amazon where the "look in this book" is working?

[And Rosta]

Robin Lee Powell, On 19/11/2012 20:26:

> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 08:19:45PM +0000, And Rosta wrote:
>> Robin Lee Powell, On 19/11/2012 18:52:
>>> Oh, and that the PDF needs to be something we can send to a
>>> printer to make a book out of, so (in particular) cross
>>> references need to be page number based (which is why we can't
>>> just print the HTML, or anything converted from it; I haven't
>>> found anything that produces page number xrefs from html, much as
>>> I'd *LOVE* to solve the whole thing that way).
>>
>> If the book's subsections are sufficiently short, wouldn't
>> cross-references to subsections, rather than to page numbers,
>> suffice? Many academic books do work thus.
>
> Well, you've got a copy of the red book, what do you think? :)
>
> Can you show me such a book? I've never seen that. Maybe something
> on Amazon where the "look in this book" is working?

I haven't time to do that. I'd just suggest that since this page number issue is an impediment to progress, you set it aside. The extra progress you could make by setting it aside outweighs any benefit of specific page refs.

[Robin Lee Powell]

OK. Can other people weigh in here? If you were reading a
technical book that had no page number based index, wouldn't that
shock you? Wouldn't you be all like "what a pack of losers"? I
think I would.

I've been assuming that that's just totally unacceptable, but I'm
willing to be persuaded otherwise.

-Robin

[.alyn.post.]

I feel roughly aligned with you. If we publish a book describing a
logical language and we can't be bothered to properly
cross-reference it I'd wonder about us more than I already do.

Honestly, A good index is worth doing by hand, if that's what it
takes.

[Luke Bergen]

+1

Though, it's a lot easier for me to say "Yes, amazing index is essential" when I'm not the one doing the work.

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[Matt Arnold]

My preferences are in the following order, from best to worst:

1. A page index.
2. An index that refers to section and paragraph numbers, if every
page has a section number, and every paragraph in the book is
numbered. I have used reference materials which worked that way, and
they were successful. Such an index does not change if typsetting or
layout were to re-flow text to different pages.
3. No index.
4. No CLL 2.0.

Auto-indexing a book from a source file in XML is a feature of Adobe
InDesign. I would love to use that to produce CLL 2.0, but have met
resistance to it in the past.

-Eppcott

[Robin Lee Powell]

I was under the impression that you weren't doing Lojban anything
anymore.

The problem I have with producing a PDF with InDesign is what we
would do to generate everything *else*. Also what happens if you
disappear again; if I disappear, there are people here who could
rebuild the docbook if they absolutely had to, but I doubt if anyone
else here uses that tool.

Having said all that, if you want me to give you a sample subset of
the docbook and see what you come up with, and in particular see
what sorts of files get generated if you try to export it back into
xml or whatever, we could certainly give that a shot.

As to your points, the choices are "page numbered index" and "index
that cannot refer to anything that relates to pages in any way at
all, so it can say section numbers but not paragraph numbers on a
page, but section number + paragraph within that section might be
possible".

It's also worth noting that this problem is already solved, it's
just a bit of a pain.

-Robin

[Robin Lee Powell]

Also please note that this is a solved problem, it's just that
solving it means docbook -> LaTeX -> PDF, and then also seperately
having a docbook -> HTML process; having docbook -> HTML and then
optionally HTML -> PDF would be an easier toolchain to setup, and
would mean that both versions have consistent visual setup (whether
you consider that last good or bad is certainly a matter of
opinion).

-Robin

[james riley]

I'm joining the group of "put Lojban on hold to do a PhD". I'm reading
way too many textbooks at the moment. Page reference is best for an
index. Of course, LaTeX can do either referencing.

cmacis

[Robin Lee Powell]

There seems to have been some confusion on the question.

To be clear, we will have an amazing index either way.

The question is, how important is the difference between:

lo 10, 17, 28, 342
klama 22, 781
abstractions 85, 141, 542

and

lo Section 1.1 Introduction, Section 2.3 Articles, Section 3.4 Bob, Section 7.8 Frobnitz
klama Section 1.1 Introduction, Section 18.12 Too Many Sections
abstractions Section 2.3 Articles, Section 5.7 Qux, Section 12.18 Backwards

Ignore the details of formatting in the latter case; pretend I can
have it say anything *except* the page number.

Assuming both indexes had the same content, which do you prefer for
a *PRINTED* book, and how much?

How much difference does it make if the average length of a section
is, say, 3 pages?

-Robin

[Jonathan Jones]

If you could make it do

lo                §1.1¶1-4 , §2.3¶5 , §3.4¶10 , §7.8¶2
klama          §1.1¶1 , §18.12¶4
abstractions §2.3¶2,3 , §5.7¶8 , §12.18¶8

But you couldn't make it do page numbers, I'd be okay with it.
 

-Robin

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[Jorge Llambías]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 6:24 PM, Robin Lee Powell
<rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>
> How much difference does it make if the average length of a section
> is, say, 3 pages?

If the sections are easy to find, it makes little difference. The
average length of a section for CLL seems to be less than 2 pages
anyway.

In the current edition sections are hard to find, because the chapter
number only appears at the beginning of each chapter, not in every
page, and section numbers don't include the chapter number, which is a
pain. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next edition.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 07:24:19PM -0300, Jorge Llamb�as wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 6:24 PM, Robin Lee Powell
> <rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> >
> > How much difference does it make if the average length of a
> > section is, say, 3 pages?
>
> If the sections are easy to find, it makes little difference. The
> average length of a section for CLL seems to be less than 2 pages
> anyway.

*nod*

> In the current edition sections are hard to find, because the
> chapter number only appears at the beginning of each chapter, not
> in every page, and section numbers don't include the chapter
> number, which is a pain. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next
> edition.

OHGODYES.

-Robin

[Remo Dentato]

I would not be shocked that much by the lack of a  page numbered index. I don't use them very often. Using section numbers (as xorxes suggested) would be perfect once the section number is on each page.

My 2c

remod.

P.S. Does the cll-docbook repository on gitorious contain the latest version of docbook files?

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 12:28 AM, Robin Lee Powell <rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:

[Robin Lee Powell]

What's gitorious?

It's on github; http://github.com/dag/cll/

-Robin

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 05:57:18PM +0100, Remo Dentato wrote:
> I would not be shocked that much by the lack of a page numbered
> index. I don't use them very often. Using section numbers (as
> xorxes suggested) would be perfect once the section number is on
> each page.
>
> My 2c
>
> remod.
>
> P.S. Does the cll-docbook repository on gitorious contain the
> latest version of docbook files?
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 12:28 AM, Robin Lee Powell <
> rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>

[rden...@gmail.com]

On , Robin Lee Powell <rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> What's gitorious?
> It's on github; http://github.com/dag/cll/

There was an old mail in the list pointing to a different repository (gitorious is similar to github).

Thank for the link to the github one.

remod

[Matt Arnold]

InDesign imports XML and formats it automatically based on style
sheets. My thought was that if I were to be unavailable to make
revisions, someone else could probably take the source XML and format
it the same way they were already going to if the InDesign version had
never existed to begin with.

I understand that there are reasons not to use InDesign, and will
defer to your preference and expertise.

Instead of this:

lo Section 1.1 Introduction, Section 2.3 Articles,
Section 3.4 Bob, Section 7.8 Frobnitz
klama Section 1.1 Introduction, Section 18.12 Too Many Sections
abstractions Section 2.3 Articles, Section 5.7 Qux, Section 12.18 Backwards

... it would be preferable to do this:

lo 1.1, 2.3, 3.4, 7.8
klama 1.1, 18.12
abstractions 2.3, 5.7, 12.18

-Eppcott

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 02:32:30PM -0500, Matt Arnold wrote:
> InDesign imports XML and formats it automatically based on style
> sheets. My thought was that if I were to be unavailable to make
> revisions, someone else could probably take the source XML and
> format it the same way they were already going to if the InDesign
> version had never existed to begin with.

How, though? Given the XML and your style sheets, what do we do
with it?

Like I said, I'm perfectly willing to give it a shot, I jsut want to
understand more.

-Robin

[Remo Dentato]

There was an old post with a link to gitorius (a service similar to github).

Thanks for the "real one".

remod

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 6:51 PM, Robin Lee Powell <rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:

What's gitorious?

It's on github; http://github.com/dag/cll/

-Robin

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 05:57:18PM +0100, Remo Dentato wrote:
> I would not be shocked that much by the lack of a  page numbered
> index. I don't use them very often. Using section numbers (as
> xorxes suggested) would be perfect once the section number is on
> each page.
>
> My 2c
>
> remod.
>
> P.S. Does the cll-docbook repository on gitorious contain the
> latest version of docbook files?
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 12:28 AM, Robin Lee Powell <
> rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>

[Matt Arnold]

I was describing starting over from your source markup, whatever it
may be (and I presumed, apparently wrongly, the source markup was XML
compatible). You would ignore my style sheets-- indeed, ignore the
InDesign Document entirely-- and carry out your current non-InDesign
plan, whatever that may be. In that case, the only work you've lost is
mine. But in any other plan, I'm useless to you anyway, so you've lost
nothing.

[John E Clifford]

Errr, did I mention a tendency to spend a lot of time on trivia while major problems go unaddressed?

---

From: Matt Arnold <matt.m...@gmail.com>
To: lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 5:16 PM
Subject: Re: Please answer a book design opinion question (was Re: [lojban] CLL 1.1/ CLL 2.0. What is your opinion in the current situation?)

> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

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>

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[Robin Lee Powell]

Are you offering to produce the book? If not, please be quiet; at
least Matt is offering to help.

-Robin

> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+un...@googlegroups.com.

> > For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
> >
>
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[John E Clifford]

The problem is that there is no book, not that it is in the wrong format or isn't indexed.

---

From: Robin Lee Powell <rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2012 5:32 PM

> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

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[banseljaj]

Having worked on it for a very little while, I can assure you that there already is a book. And as has been pointed out, our major problem is producing something out of it that can be sent to the printer and also be used in other forms.

As far ad I'm concerned, sections or pages doesn't matter as long as it is properly and completely indexed. I've read many texts with either scheme and I never had any problems.

[John E Clifford]

Where is this book?  How valid is it?  Why can't it be published (is it in some exotic format that can't be converted -- if so, why?  Come to that, why was it formatted at all before consideration was given to its eventual use?)?

---

From: banseljaj <ali.saj...@gmail.com>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2012 2:45 AM

Subject: Re: Please answer a book design opinion question (was Re: [lojban] CLL 1.1/ CLL 2.0. What is your opinion in the current situation?)

Having worked on it for a very little while, I can assure you that there already is a book. And as has been pointed out, our major problem is producing something out of it that can be sent to the printer and also be used in other forms.

As far ad I'm concerned, sections or pages doesn't matter as long as it is properly and completely indexed. I've read many texts with either scheme and I never had any problems.

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[Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG]

John E Clifford wrote:
> Where is this book? How valid is it? Why can't it be published (is it
> in some exotic format that can't be converted -- if so, why? Come to
> that, why was it formatted at all before consideration was given to its
> eventual use?)?

I think you've lost some context, pc. They are referring to Cowan's red
book CLL, which of course *has* already been published once. The
original was formatted and indexed in Microsoft Word for Windows of a
pre-1997 version, which I then with considerable difficulty converted to
a PDF format compatible with the printer's typesetting equipment (it
kept changing the page breaks when I changed output devices, so I could
not prepare my own galleys).

To revise this book, the first stage is to correct all the typos and
minor errors that people have identified over the years. That will make
version 1.1. But no one is working in antediluvian Word, but rather in
more modern formats that are platform independent - I think they are
using some form of HTML or XML. (And that formatting was done
independently of any publication plans, because a major purpose was to
have an online version of the text).

The format change means that all the existing indexing is probably
unrecoverable, since it is encoded in Word's internal format. So the
main issue of *this* thread is what kind of index they want the new
version to have, with side issues of exactly what format and tools will
be used to prepare the publication. That CAN be decided after the text
is done, but there is no harm in people trying various approaches before
then, so that we don't have the year and a half lag that John and I went
through between the time he was essentially done with the book, and when
we finally got boxes of books for shipment. (It took a LONG time to
format and index the original).

To whatever extent that the formatting can be done independently of the
writing, it allows the job to be farmed out to more people of differing
skills, and therefore gets a published version out sooner. So
formatting can and should take place before the text is in final form.

The question of indexing is of course almost entirely independent of the
text preparation itself, and is dependent on the formatting or indexing
tool that is used.

There are people who want to be able to get a copy of 1.1, even though
it really is only a temporary document. Robin is also
planning/coordinating a more thorough revision (version 2.0) which will
incorporate all of the byfy decisions. Ideally, much of the formatting
and indexing that they do for 1.1 will be recoverable for 2.0, but that
is possible only if they choose tools and methods that allow for this.

lojbab

--
Bob LeChevalier loj...@lojban.org www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

[John E Clifford]

Yes, I have 1.1 and 2.0 confused (surely not alone in this in this conversation).  The other questions remain.  How many platform-independent typesetting formats are there and how intertranslatable are they? (given the tendency toward proprietary software in some circles, I fear the answers are "many" and "not very").  Pick one, strip back to ASCII (which has the virtue of being everywhere readable) and rebuild.  That will be faster than all the fiddling and also give back the control that the other systems seem to have problems with.  But what do I know?

---

From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <loj...@lojban.org>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, November 23, 2012 11:08 AM

Subject: Re: Please answer a book design opinion question (was Re: [lojban] CLL 1.1/ CLL 2.0. What is your opinion in the current situation?)

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[v4hn]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 11:30:23AM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 11:59:43AM -0701, .alyn.post. wrote:
> > Whoa. Honestly didn't know about this option. Installing docbook
> > stuff is way too much work for me to do anywhere but a custom
> > virtual machine that I can hose when I fsck it up or get tired of
> > the mountain of dependencies. I'm rarely keen to do such a thing.
>
> Yeah, it's not just docbook. Actually, the docbook is fairly easy;
> it's the LaTeX stack wiht full working unicode support that took me
> like a week of work at one point.
>
> Anyways, yes, on vrici running "make" in the CLL git dir Just Works
> (tm). You already have an account there. :)

Wow, it's `make -f build/Makefile` with some minor fixes for which
I added pull-requests (or scripts/build), but everything
works fine over here on my machine first time I try.
It builds all formats and most things look nice at first glance.

What is left to do? {u'i}


v4hn

[Robin Lee Powell]

The PDF looks good? Huh. Go look at the sections with non-ASCII
characters (in particular, the IPA charts, and the alternative
orthographies section) and see if you still like it. If you do,
please write up what you did, in particular what OS you're on and
what LaTeX packages you installed, and did you have to add any
package repos or anything?

-Robin

[v4hn]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 02:27:53PM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 11:21:29PM +0100, v4hn wrote:
> > It builds all formats and most things look nice at first glance.
> >
> > What is left to do? {u'i}
>
> The PDF looks good? Huh. Go look at the sections with non-ASCII
> characters (in particular, the IPA charts, and the alternative
> orthographies section) and see if you still like it. If you do,
> please write up what you did, in particular what OS you're on and
> what LaTeX packages you installed, and did you have to add any
> package repos or anything?

Well, judge for yourself, I pushed the pdf to http://v4hn.de/files/cll.pdf

I don't really know what it is supposed to look like, but
e.g. the IPA page 35 looks fine to me.

The "alternative orthographie" section would look much better
if you included the actual Tengwar characters by the way :)
Annatar for example is a pretty nice open font for Tengwar.
I just recently used it to write some lines in lojban.

I use a fairly unknown linux distribution called Lunar Linux[1].
We run texlive 20120701 and I'm not aware of modifying anything
really. I might have rebuild some tex caches some time ago,
but not much more.


v4hn

---
[1] - http://lunar-linux.org

[Robin Lee Powell]

OK; most distros don't have a texlive that's that recent, which is
what led to a lot of the troubles I had.

Hey, that looks pretty good! Go you!

-Robin

[v4hn]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 03:22:06PM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 12:11:05AM +0100, v4hn wrote:
> > > > What is left to do? {u'i}
>

> OK; most distros don't have a texlive that's that recent, which is
> what led to a lot of the troubles I had.
>
> Hey, that looks pretty good! Go you!

Well, if you answer my question and can point me to some more
``lightweight'' things to do I might find the time to do something..
Just like everyone else, I don't have much spare time.

Also, are github pull requests processed? Some of them are quite old.


v4hn

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 12:27:32AM +0100, v4hn wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 03:22:06PM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 12:11:05AM +0100, v4hn wrote:
> > > > > What is left to do? {u'i}
> >
> > OK; most distros don't have a texlive that's that recent, which
> > is what led to a lot of the troubles I had.
> >
> > Hey, that looks pretty good! Go you!
>
> Well, if you answer my question and can point me to some more
> ``lightweight'' things to do I might find the time to do
> something.. Just like everyone else, I don't have much spare time.

I don't have the time to even do this; look at the TODO file and
other documentation. Sorry.

> Also, are github pull requests processed? Some of them are quite
> old.

See above. I hope to get back to it some day, but between two
girlfriends, two jobs, and two infant daughters, I've been
crushingly busy.

[v4hn]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 03:35:38PM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> I don't have the time to even do this; look at the TODO file and
> other documentation. Sorry.
>
> > Also, are github pull requests processed? Some of them are quite
> > old.
>
> See above. I hope to get back to it some day, but between two
> girlfriends, two jobs, and two infant daughters, I've been
> crushingly busy.

Fair enough. As you mention over and over again that you really don't
have any time at all, it might really be a good idea to formally
reinstantiate the BPFK, but that's not really something /I/ should
talk about...

.i mi baza jundi le datnyvei to la'a toi


mi'e la .van. mu'o

[Robin Lee Powell]

The BPFK was never disbanded; it just stopped *doing* anything. The
mailing list is still there; have at.

[Jonathan Jones]

Yeah, don't listen to gleki. Lack of activity does not mean dead, whatever he says.

Speaking of, is there a BPFK task list? I would not be surprised if I'm not the only BPFK member who isn't doing anything solely because I don't know what needs doing.

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[la gleki]

On Friday, December 28, 2012 7:25:25 AM UTC+4, aionys wrote:

Yeah, don't listen to gleki. Lack of activity does not mean dead, whatever he says.

Speaking of, is there a BPFK task list? I would not be surprised if I'm not the only BPFK member who isn't doing anything solely because I don't know what needs doing.

If so it's vitally important to me that selpa'i, tsani, latro'a and me (.o'acu'i) are allowed there. Are they?

[Jonathan Jones]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 11:09 PM, la gleki <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, December 28, 2012 7:25:25 AM UTC+4, aionys wrote:

Yeah, don't listen to gleki. Lack of activity does not mean dead, whatever he says.

Speaking of, is there a BPFK task list? I would not be surprised if I'm not the only BPFK member who isn't doing anything solely because I don't know what needs doing.

If so it's vitally important to me that selpa'i, tsani, latro'a and me (.o'acu'i) are allowed there. Are they?

If what is so?

If you're talking about the existence of a task list, then you shuld be aware that such a list would contain only the items needed to be done to complete the documentation of the baseline. Official deliberation of any proposed changes to the language don't occur until after the baseline is complete. (xorlo and dot-side being exceptions for wgat should be obvious reasons).

As far as /I'M/ concerned, the only prerequisites for being a member of the BPFK are that you have a good understanding of Lojban (regardless of fluency, which is really just how many words you've memorized) and that you want to assist in the duties of the BPFK. So, if it were up to me, I'd say all the aforementioned are welcome. You'll have to find out what Robin says about it, though- as BDFL, it's really up to him what the requirements are and who is allowed.
 

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[Robin Lee Powell]

It's an open list; https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bpfk-list

-Robin

> >> To post to this group, send email to loj...@googlegroups.com<javascript:>
> >> .

> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to

> >> lojban+un...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>.

> >> For more options, visit this group at
> >> http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> > mu'o mi'e .aionys.
> >
> > .i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
> > (Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )
> >
>

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[Robin Lee Powell]

There is no real task list at this time. The big projects I have in
my head are the CLL updates for xorlo, finishing a dictionary (i.e.
working on
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KUquj0w5V5Q7V6t2sne43Xb4kOkspHegbvwMzW-2NlM/edit
) and making a less crappy jbovlaste.

-Robin

[la gleki]

On Friday, December 28, 2012 10:53:29 PM UTC+4, Robin Powell wrote:

There is no real task list at this time.  The big projects I have in
my head are the CLL updates for xorlo, finishing a dictionary (i.e.
working on
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KUquj0w5V5Q7V6t2sne43Xb4kOkspHegbvwMzW-2NlM/edit
) and making a less crappy jbovlaste.

Many months ago Lindar and I updated it's format (removed some duplicate lines etc.)

The  last version of the functional list is https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ahngu1CNj7wddDZBRzgwMm1EWlpKUEJRcTQtUGNCMFE#gid=7

Other tabs (there are tabs in this document!!!) are also worth reading and translating. They include computer terminology, nuclear physics etc.

[v4hn]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 10:53:29AM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> There is no real task list at this time. The big projects I have in
> my head are the CLL updates for xorlo, finishing a dictionary

> and making a less crappy jbovlaste.
>
> -Robin

What's up with http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Procedure and the checkpoints?
I know it says "obsolete" there, but still it is well thought out
and looks like a good infrastracture to get going again.

I know the BPFK is not dead, I recognize a lot of names on the member list,
and I haven't been around for too long. But it looks like that to me
because there weren't /any/ "official" announcements concerning decisions or
even new official proposals or any other progress within the last year.
I only heard of a couple of draft-proposals by people who explicitly state
that they are _not_ members of the BPFK and some complains about
infrastructure/tools which need fixing (jbovlaste, autoposting of texts,
TeX-problems, ...). This is no development, it's maintenance as far as I can see.

Again though, I'm only became interested in lojban last year,
so I'm really not the one to give speeches...


v4hn

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 10:51:07PM +0100, v4hn wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 10:53:29AM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> > There is no real task list at this time. The big projects I
> > have in my head are the CLL updates for xorlo, finishing a
> > dictionary and making a less crappy jbovlaste.
> >
> > -Robin
>
> What's up with http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Procedure and the
> checkpoints? I know it says "obsolete" there, but still it is well
> thought out and looks like a good infrastracture to get going
> again.

No-one did any of the work; eventually I got tired of doing all the
work myself, and/or *constantly* having to harass people.

That's a slight exaggeration, but only slight; certainly other
people helped, extensively in some cases, but it was *always* a
struggle, and eventually I stopped struggling, and nothing has
happened since.

This happens a lot around here.

[Jonathan Jones]

Wasn't it replaced by http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Community+Work ?

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[Robin Lee Powell]

The same commentary applies.

-Robin

[Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG]

v4hn wrote:
> What's up with http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Procedure and the checkpoints?
> I know it says "obsolete" there, but still it is well thought out
> and looks like a good infrastracture to get going again.

It WAS a good infrastructure, when we had a dozen or more people
actively working on it. But that didn't last. Everyone was doing their
own thing, because that is how this community has always worked. As a
result, any topic that was well-settled got little attention (and
continued undocumented), and things that were contentious turned into
endless discussion that distracted people from doing productive stuff
that would actually move the process along. The bottom line is that no
one had enough time (consistently over the long haul) to make the thing
work. Nick Nicolas, the original jatna, became burned out and
frustrated with the lack of progress, because even his skills weren't
enough to herd cats. Robin took over, in the absence of other
volunteers, and had only limited success.

> I know the BPFK is not dead, I recognize a lot of names on the member list,
> and I haven't been around for too long.

It isn't dead. It just has nothing to do as a GROUP, because there
haven't enough individuals actually doing the individual things that
need to get done, which are mostly boring and time-consuming, (or
requiring specialized knowledge).

> But it looks like that to me
> because there weren't /any/ "official" announcements concerning decisions

That is because there have been no such decisions, and there won't be
any until after CLL 1.1 is done. We have to document the status quo
before we consider changes, or people won't know what is being proposed
to change.

Even then, changes will be very limited. Only what is actually broken
should be fixed prescriptively.

The language design era is supposedly done. Future change should evolve
out of usage, with changes merely serving as documentation of what
actual Lojbanists are doing with the language.

> or even new official proposals

There have never been ANY official proposals since byfy started.

> or any other progress within the last year.

The progress, such that it is, is whatever Robin says that it is. He
was granted essentially dictatorial powers until (at least) such time as
CLL is updated.

> I only heard of a couple of draft-proposals by people who explicitly state
> that they are _not_ members of the BPFK

No one is in a position to evaluate a draft proposal. And a proposal to
be considered will have to include the proposed changes to CLL among
other things. I doubt that anyone in recent years has ever written up a
proposed change with anywhere near the detail that will be expected.

> and some complains about
> infrastructure/tools which need fixing (jbovlaste, autoposting of texts,
> TeX-problems, ...). This is no development, it's maintenance as far as I can see.

It is enabling Robin to get his job done, with as little possible
demands on his limited time.

The main job right now is editorial, and we haven't come up with a way
to farm out editorial tasks. (Perhaps if the original byfy structure
had been organized around CLL chapters rather than selma'o, we might
have learned how, but the original focus was on making decisions, not on
documenting things to any consistent standard, and the documentation
never got done.) As such, we are stuck with having one editor
attempting to get things done in his limited spare time.

[Jonathan Jones]

Perhaps crowd-sourcing? I had some success with that when I wanted to get human audio for all the gismu. I had started out with the intention of doing that work myself, but after about 180 gismu, I got sick of it, so I parsed it into chunks and sent an announcement on the group saying, basically, "I don't want to do this anymore! You guys do this now!". As of today, all but ~100 gismu have been done, and 50 of them are my fault.

Possibly something similar could be done in this scenario? It takes a bit of setting up the "chunks", but I can tell you, the chunk setup is much, much, MUCH less work than doing the work on your own.
 

lojbab

--
Bob LeChevalier    loj...@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

[v4hn]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 08:40:34AM -0500, Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG wrote:
> v4hn wrote:
> >I know the BPFK is not dead, I recognize a lot of names on the member list,
> >and I haven't been around for too long.
>
> It isn't dead. It just has nothing to do as a GROUP, because there
> haven't enough individuals actually doing the individual things that
> need to get done, which are mostly boring and time-consuming, (or
> requiring specialized knowledge).

Also, as someone just mentioned some people just don't
know what needs to be done and how they can help!

> > But it looks like that to me
> >because there weren't /any/ "official" announcements concerning decisions
>
> That is because there have been no such decisions, and there won't
> be any until after CLL 1.1 is done. We have to document the status
> quo before we consider changes, or people won't know what is being
> proposed to change.

If CLL 1.1 is not about making decisions, not about including proposals, etc.
then WHAT THE @!#$ _is it about_? Just typesetting?

The work that needs to be done for the baseline is nicely described here
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Community+Work
and I understand why it is hard to make progress with this..
(Though it seems, this is the best place to start contributing)
How does one get feedback on the stuff he wrote there,
given that he attempts to update some definitions?
Just wait for an email from someone who got notified about the change?

Does everything in there need to be finished for CLL 1.1 or do I mix up stuff here?
Will these definitions be included in the CLL (1.1?)?

> >or even new official proposals
>
> There have never been ANY official proposals since byfy started.

At least in practice it seems to me like xorlo is such an official proposal
which is still not incorporated(whatever this means exactly).

> >or any other progress within the last year.
>
> The progress, such that it is, is whatever Robin says that it is.
> He was granted essentially dictatorial powers until (at least) such
> time as CLL is updated.

That's a rather blurry and - given that Robin does not even have time
to describe things - non-helpful description of what should be done.
Ok, he has dictatorial powers. But if few other people know what to do,
then something is severely wrong...

Concerning editorial work...
There is a TODO file/the issues page on github, but a lot of items on that list
are just incomprehensible to me. What exactly does e.g.
"<lojbanization> tables are shit" mean?


v4hn

[Jonathan Jones]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 1:56 PM, v4hn <m...@v4hn.de> wrote:

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 08:40:34AM -0500, Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG wrote:
> v4hn wrote:
> >I know the BPFK is not dead, I recognize a lot of names on the member list,
> >and I haven't been around for too long.
>
> It isn't dead.  It just has nothing to do as a GROUP, because there
> haven't enough individuals actually doing the individual things that
> need to get done, which are mostly boring and time-consuming, (or
> requiring specialized knowledge).

Also, as someone just mentioned some people just don't
know what needs to be done and how they can help!

> > But it looks like that to me
> >because there weren't /any/ "official" announcements concerning decisions
>
> That is because there have been no such decisions, and there won't
> be any until after CLL 1.1 is done.  We have to document the status
> quo before we consider changes, or people won't know what is being
> proposed to change.

If CLL 1.1 is not about making decisions, not about including proposals, etc.
then WHAT THE @!#$ _is it about_? Just typesetting?

CLL1.1 is about converting the existing CLL into a format that is more easily able to be presented in various formats, including .pdf, web, and print, and also easier to update the content of the CLL itself when changes to the language (like xorlo) /are/ made.
 

The work that needs to be done for the baseline is nicely described here
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Community+Work
and I understand why it is hard to make progress with this..
(Though it seems, this is the best place to start contributing)
How does one get feedback on the stuff he wrote there,
given that he attempts to update some definitions?
Just wait for an email from someone who got notified about the change?

Or you could specifically ask for feedback in the BPFK list.
 

Does everything in there need to be finished for CLL 1.1 or do I mix up stuff here?
Will these definitions be included in the CLL (1.1?)?

You're mixing stuff up. The above is what needs to be done to complete the baseline, which is, simply put, documenting the definitions, usage, etc. of all the words in Lojban, not including fu'ivla, zi'evla, cmevla and lujvo.

The CLL is, basically, a complete description of the grammar of Lojban, whereas the BPFK baseline is a complete description of the vocabulary. And I'm being overly simplistic here, of course, but that is the gist of the thing.
 

> >or even new official proposals
>
> There have never been ANY official proposals since byfy started.

At least in practice it seems to me like xorlo is such an official proposal
which is still not incorporated(whatever this means exactly).

xorlo (and dotside, I believe) are officially part of the language. Neither have been incorporated into the CLL yet, mostly because making changes to the CLL as is is extremely difficult, and partly because right now the focus is on making the CLL, as it is now content-wise, into something that takes advantage of technologies that didn't exist at the time of its writing, such as concurrent versioning, and the internet.
 

> >or any other progress within the last year.
>
> The progress, such that it is, is whatever Robin says that it is.
> He was granted essentially dictatorial powers until (at least) such
> time as CLL is updated.

That's a rather blurry and - given that Robin does not even have time
to describe things - non-helpful description of what should be done.
Ok, he has dictatorial powers. But if few other people know what to do,
then something is severely wrong...

Concerning editorial work...
There is a TODO file/the issues page on github, but a lot of items on that list
are just incomprehensible to me. What exactly does e.g.
"<lojbanization> tables are shit" mean?

Well, it means that tables that utilize the <lojbanization> should not be used, because they are "shit".
 

v4hn

[Jonathan Jones]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 2:14 PM, Jonathan Jones <eye...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, it means that tables that utilize the <lojbanization>* should not be used, because they are "shit".

*<lojbanization> tag

[entot]

On Sunday, December 30, 2012 5:56:06 AM UTC+9, v4hn wrote:

> There is a TODO file/the issues page on github, but a lot of items on that list 
are just incomprehensible to me.

All todos in the TODO file have been moved/copied to the issue tracker.

I've tried to add details along the way as far as I can understand.

(I just joined the project a month ago.)

Issues in the "Markup" and "Data" milestones are relatively easy,

and also I think are of higher priority than the rest.

If you find something unclear, ask away there or here.

@rlpowell: Can you handle the "Move all todos to the issue tracker" pull request

so there's no ambiguity on where to look for tasks to work on?

Only the TODO file has been changed:

https://github.com/dag/cll/pull/21

mu'o

[Robert LeChevalier]

Jonathan Jones wrote:

> It is enabling Robin to get his job done, with as little possible
> demands on his limited time.
>
> The main job right now is editorial, and we haven't come up with a
> way to farm out editorial tasks. (Perhaps if the original byfy
> structure had been organized around CLL chapters rather than
> selma'o, we might have learned how, but the original focus was on
> making decisions, not on documenting things to any consistent
> standard, and the documentation never got done.) As such, we are
> stuck with having one editor attempting to get things done in his
> limited spare time.
>
>
> Perhaps crowd-sourcing? I had some success with that when I wanted to
> get human audio for all the gismu. I had started out with the intention
> of doing that work myself, but after about 180 gismu, I got sick of it,
> so I parsed it into chunks and sent an announcement on the group saying,
> basically, "I don't want to do this anymore! You guys do this now!". As
> of today, all but ~100 gismu have been done, and 50 of them are my fault.
>
> Possibly something similar could be done in this scenario? It takes a
> bit of setting up the "chunks", but I can tell you, the chunk setup is
> much, much, MUCH less work than doing the work on your own.

I could be misunderstanding the concept of crowdsourcing, but I think
that is what the old (failed) system was. The crowd were the byfy
members (basically anyone who wanted to work), and the chunks are as
defined on the byfy page. There was a volunteer "shepherd" assigned to
each section who would attempt to consolidate the crowd's efforts.

The only problem is that the "crowd" never did anything. Generally, if
anyone did anything, it was the shepherd acting on his/her own. The
crowd mostly argued with each other, and so much effort was spent in the
discussions that no one had any time left to actually do any work (and
people like me with limited Lojban time can't even manage to keep up
with the discussions - I still have some 23 messages to go through in
the "Polysemy of nai" thread that I actually tried to participate in,
and it ended a week ago - but the really major discussions could
generate more than 100 messages a day).

These discussions for the most part were more or less the same kind of
thing that happens on Lojban List itself. Lots of quick back-and-forth,
and you need to read all the messages to understand the context what any
given posting is talking about.

The other problem is that the writeups weren't in themselves usable as
sections for CLL. They were selma'o and cmavo definitions, perhaps
suitable for an annotated dictionary that does not exist. (To be
accurate, the predecessor for CLL was something called the "selma'o
catalogue, and the byfy writeups weren't all that bad as submissions to
such a catalog. But the catalog gave way to CLL, remaining only as a
quasi-appendix "index" chapter at the end of the book. The byfy chunks
were producing annotated selma'o catalog entries, but no one was turning
those into CLL text).

----

John Cowan came up with a concept called "The Elephant" which would
allow crowdsourcing of ideas and their documentation, with the added
proviso that it would be organized in such a way that people could
easily find preceding discussions on the same topic, so that we wouldn't
end up with the same discussion being repeated every couple of years
with only nuanced variations. But no one ever implemented the thing.

----

The closest we ever came to a workable system for dealing with concept
documentation was just before CLL 1.0 when John Cowan and I instituted a
change proposal system for the YACC grammar (which also effectively
entailed the most major changes to the CLL text). To talk about a
change topic, someone had to write the thing up FIRST (typically a
screenful of text), and then discussion was more or less confined to the
pros and cons of what was written up - an alternate proposal would need
an alternate writeup.

But it didn't work either because only Cowan and I ever did actual
writeups. On a couple of topics, a few people wrote things akin to our
writeups but with no standard form, and we used them anyway for purpose
of discussion, eventually massaging them into standard form.

The current system needs the same thing to do any sort of crowdsourcing,
with the "proposal" including the actual CLL text, as well as some sort
of rationale for any changes. But no one will do this kind of work;
they just kibbitz about everyone else's work until no one is doing any
work to kibbitz on, just engaging in back-and-forth.

It'd kinda be like Wikipedia if almost no one ever edited anything, just
engaged in back-channel arguments about the most controversial edits
that others have made.

(Another version of crowdsourcing was used in the Alice in Wonderland
section. People could check out a section, add to or change it, and put
it back. There was a good group effort for a while, but the translation
got finished because xorxes did the bulk of it by himself. This is more
or less what we've been reduced to in the CLL update, with Robin doing
all the work. But at least in theory, Alice was a crowdsource.)

lojbab

[la gleki]

^ ^ 

That's very interesting. I'm sure CLL and the dictionary must approach each other.

vlasisku has short links to CLL chapters mentioning them (probably from the index you are talking about).

However, I can't imagine a book being a dictionary at the same time.

And a dictionary being a reference grammar.

I've never seen such dictionaries for any languages. Have you?

But this is something that must be discussed further.

[Robert LeChevalier]

v4hn wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 08:40:34AM -0500, Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG wrote:
>> v4hn wrote:
>>> I know the BPFK is not dead, I recognize a lot of names on the member list,
>>> and I haven't been around for too long.
>>
>> It isn't dead. It just has nothing to do as a GROUP, because there
>> haven't enough individuals actually doing the individual things that
>> need to get done, which are mostly boring and time-consuming, (or
>> requiring specialized knowledge).
>
> Also, as someone just mentioned some people just don't
> know what needs to be done and how they can help!

At this point, one can only pay attention to whatever Robin says. If he
doesn't ask for help, there is nothing you can do right now.

Everything I write from here on is my own view of the situation. It may
not be Robin's view, and Robin's view is absolute until/unless the
Board/membership decides to fire him, which ain't gonna happen, since we
have no better option.

Jonathan's summary may be more correct than mine, certainly more
concise, and probably more nicely put %^)

>>> But it looks like that to me
>>> because there weren't /any/ "official" announcements concerning decisions
>>
>> That is because there have been no such decisions, and there won't
>> be any until after CLL 1.1 is done. We have to document the status
>> quo before we consider changes, or people won't know what is being
>> proposed to change.
>
> If CLL 1.1 is not about making decisions, not about including proposals, etc.
> then WHAT THE @!#$ _is it about_? Just typesetting?

Mostly that, and incorporating a raft of typos and corrections that were
identified by the community over the last 15 years. I don't know what
these are, though there are wikipedia pages on the topic. And Robin may
be incorporating the non-controversial byfy topics, for all I know.

Once we have that done, THEN any change proposals can be considered as a
delta to the formal status quo. The sum of 1.1 plus all proposals
approved will result in CLL 2.0.

> The work that needs to be done for the baseline is nicely described here
> http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Community+Work

That was the work required BEFORE Robin gave up on people actually doing
such work. Such writeups probably would still be useful, if anyone did
them, but they are no longer the main effort/critical path. Because no
one ever did them. For years.

> and I understand why it is hard to make progress with this..
> (Though it seems, this is the best place to start contributing)

5, 6, or 7 years ago, that would indeed have been the best place. But
at the rate it was getting done, byfy would not have a complete writeup
20 years from now. Because no one ever did the work.

People wanting to help now who weren't around then may suffer some from
the nonproductivity of those who came before (including myself).

> How does one get feedback on the stuff he wrote there,

Back when that was the operative approach, one would submit the text to
the appropriate byfy section, which would then be open for discussion.
There were shepherds that would edit the submissions into a single
document for a given byfy section and they had full edit privileges on
that section. If there is no shepherd for a section, any byfy member
could sign up for the job.

I am not sure that this submission procedure still holds, or whether
editing is still restricted to the shepherd. Originally byfy was a
separate wiki but I think it has been merged with the main one.

Ideally, if you are following the guidelines, there will need to be no
feedback, and you go on to another cmavo. Feedback = discussion, and
too much discussion means no one does any work to get discussed.

> given that he attempts to update some definitions?

You can't "update" definitions that have never been written in the first
place. And we aren't really interested in "updated" definitions. We
want to make sure we have the status quo language documented, before
considering any changes/updates.

> Just wait for an email from someone who got notified about the change?

byfy members are part of a byfy mailing list, which sends a copy to all
subscribers of any submission or discussion on the byfy pages. For the
last few years, there has only been intermittent discussion, and no
subnissions at all.

> Does everything in there need to be finished for CLL 1.1 or do I mix up stuff here?

Ideally, we need complete definitions of all selma'o and cmavo within
each selma'o for both CLL and for the dictionary. The text format as
described there was to serve as the raw material for those two
documents. I think effectively Robin has chosen to short-circuit that
and go straight into CLL format (hopefully the dictionary format, closer
to the byfy writeups in style, will come later).

> Will these definitions be included in the CLL (1.1?)?

What is included in 1.1 (and probably 2.0) is entirely up to Robin. The
work wasn't getting done, so he decided to make himself dictator. And
no one really objected.

>>> or even new official proposals
>>
>> There have never been ANY official proposals since byfy started.
>
> At least in practice it seems to me like xorlo is such an official proposal
> which is still not incorporated(whatever this means exactly).

xorlo was more-or-less adopted independently of the normal byfy process,
precisely because the byfy process was never getting done, and the
community wanted a decision on xorlo. But no, I don't think Robin or
anyone else has written it up in CLL format. It was written up in byfy
section format resulting in endless and vituperative discussion. There
was no possibility of consensus on the status quo gadri.

(xorxes and a few others have generally wanted to document the language
as they wish it to be - or perhaps it is better stated that xorxes
speaks and writes the language as he wishes to be, which is not in
accordance with CLL 1.0, and the weight of his usage over the years has
made his ideas a new status quo, which he and some others want to
document. In general, 1.1 is NOT supposed to contain such changes,
which would become part of 2.0, with the exception of the specially
approved xorlo proposal. But that decision is really up to Robin at
this point.

>>> or any other progress within the last year.
>>
>> The progress, such that it is, is whatever Robin says that it is.
>> He was granted essentially dictatorial powers until (at least) such
>> time as CLL is updated.
>
> That's a rather blurry and - given that Robin does not even have time
> to describe things - non-helpful description of what should be done.

To put it impolitely, "tough".

> Ok, he has dictatorial powers. But if few other people know what to do,
> then something is severely wrong...

Few other people can do anything, so there is nothing to "know".

> Concerning editorial work...
> There is a TODO file/the issues page on github, but a lot of items on that list
> are just incomprehensible to me. What exactly does e.g.
> "<lojbanization> tables are shit" mean?

I have no idea. And "github" is a meaningless buzzword to me (though
not to Robin and others). I never really made the conceptual transition
to on-line web-based collaborative efforts, and remain stuck in the
email era, which is why Robin is doing this and not me. I think it is a
tool where people turn the various formats of CLL into other formats,
and thus probably the "<lojbanization>" refers to some sort of tag that
is not usable as-is. Probably to work on it, you need to know how the
formatting tools work. It isn't language work per-se, but software.

lojbab

[Robert LeChevalier]

Jonathan Jones wrote:
> You're mixing stuff up. The above is what needs to be done to complete
> the baseline, which is, simply put, documenting the definitions, usage,
> etc. of all the words in Lojban, not including fu'ivla, zi'evla, cmevla
> and lujvo.
>
> The CLL is, basically, a complete description of the grammar of Lojban,
> whereas the BPFK baseline is a complete description of the vocabulary.
> And I'm being overly simplistic here, of course, but that is the gist of
> the thing.

That is correct.

byfy started because I was incapable on my own of writing proper cmavo
definitions for the Lojban dictionary. Cowan had come up with the
selma'o catalog as a step in this process, and the selma'o catalog
became CLL. That was in 1997. By 2002, we still had no set of cmavo
definitions, and I realized that my whole baseline concept was bankrupt
because I couldn't produce a dictionary. byfy was a solution to this
problem, an organized approach to having others crowdsource what I could
not complete by myself.

> > >or even new official proposals
> >
> > There have never been ANY official proposals since byfy started.
>
> At least in practice it seems to me like xorlo is such an official
> proposal
> which is still not incorporated(whatever this means exactly).
>
> xorlo (and dotside, I believe) are officially part of the language.

xorlo is, by special vote. dotside is not (yet) official, but is
probably effectively so, because those of us who have not accepted it
aren't doing much with the language.

> Neither have been incorporated into the CLL yet, mostly because making
> changes to the CLL as is is extremely difficult, and partly because
> right now the focus is on making the CLL, as it is now content-wise,
> into something that takes advantage of technologies that didn't exist at
> the time of its writing, such as concurrent versioning, and the internet.

Much better than I put it. When byfy started, "crowdsourcing" wasn't
yet a word, and the only tools we had were modified primitive wiki programs.

And I still work in Microsoft Word, conceptually back in the 90s. HTML
and its tag-based relatives are all but unintelligible to me. So I am
hardly one to explain this.

> > >or any other progress within the last year.
> >
> > The progress, such that it is, is whatever Robin says that it is.
> > He was granted essentially dictatorial powers until (at least) such
> > time as CLL is updated.
>
> That's a rather blurry and - given that Robin does not even have time
> to describe things - non-helpful description of what should be done.
> Ok, he has dictatorial powers. But if few other people know what to do,
> then something is severely wrong...
>
> Concerning editorial work...
> There is a TODO file/the issues page on github, but a lot of items
> on that list
> are just incomprehensible to me. What exactly does e.g.
> "<lojbanization> tables are shit" mean?
>
>
> Well, it means that tables that utilize the <lojbanization> should not
> be used, because they are "shit".

I don't think he knows what "<lojbanization> tables" are, or why they
might be "shit". I don't know either, though I made a guess in my response.

lojbab

[Robert LeChevalier]

la gleki wrote:
> The other problem is that the writeups weren't in themselves usable as
> sections for CLL. They were selma'o and cmavo definitions, perhaps
> suitable for an annotated dictionary that does not exist. (To be
> accurate, the predecessor for CLL was something called the "selma'o
> catalogue, and the byfy writeups weren't all that bad as submissions to
> such a catalog. But the catalog gave way to CLL, remaining only as a
> quasi-appendix "index" chapter at the end of the book. The byfy chunks
> were producing annotated selma'o catalog entries, but no one was
> turning
> those into CLL text).
>
>
> ^ ^
> That's very interesting. I'm sure CLL and the dictionary must approach
> each other.
>
> vlasisku has short links to CLL chapters mentioning them (probably from
> the index you are talking about).

I have no idea what vlasisku is.

The printed CLL has an index that is almost 10% of the length of the
book. We put a lot of work into that index, so that people can find
things easily. It worked, too. But the index is based on paper
pagination and thus doesn't port to the web, and it was specific to
Microsoft Word of the 1997 vintage (though later versions can read it),
making it all but impossible to transfer to current efforts.

> However, I can't imagine a book being a dictionary at the same time.

???

Most dictionaries in history have been books. Paper, binding, etc.
There was no real alternative until the last couple of decades.

> And a dictionary being a reference grammar.

Most good reference dictionaries INCLUDE a reference grammar, generally
in brief form in a chapter at the beginning or the end. The Lojban
reference grammar started as such a chapter intended for the dictionary,
and then grew into a full book of its own.


http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/grammar has one on-line form of an
English reference grammar, albeit a simplified one.

More comprehensive reference grammars typically run to several hundred
pages and catalog the exceptions to the rules along with the rules
themselves.

> I've never seen such dictionaries for any languages. Have you?

Yes. I have dictionaries for around 20 languages from the word-making days.

I have also seen (and possess) reference grammars, mostly for English,
though I have one reference grammar for Chinese recommended by Cowan,
and a comparative reference grammar that discusses several dozen
languages in more or less the same format of 10-50 page essays.

I did a study of lexicography in the 1990s to learn how to write a
proper dictionary.

> But this is something that must be discussed further.

NOTHING "must" be discussed further.

Things must be DONE, not "discussed". Discussion is the enemy of
getting things done.

And proposing changes for discussion, as you seem to habitually do,
makes paying attention to your proposals antithetical to getting things
done.

Sorry for being undiplomatic.

lojbab

[la gleki]

ta'onaisai can you please explain how gimste was formed? Is it  based on english semantics?

Who and how selected sumti places? Was there anybody who looked at e.g. Chinese semantics and imported concepts from there?

and a comparative reference grammar that discusses several dozen
languages in more or less the same format of 10-50 page essays.

I did a study of lexicography in the 1990s to learn how to write a
proper dictionary.

> But this is something that must be discussed further.

NOTHING "must" be discussed further.

Things must be DONE, not "discussed".  Discussion is the enemy of
getting things done.

And proposing changes for discussion, as you seem to habitually do,
makes paying attention to your proposals antithetical to getting things
done.

If you mean helping with CLL 1.1 i already expressed my opinion.

As for rewriting cmavo definitions i dont understand how I can help.

Do you wish i presented a ma'oste with new definitions? what would it change?

everyone would ignore it.

[v4hn]

Thanks to both of you for these detailed explanations!

They really help a lot to understand the current state
of affairs, probably not just me.


v4hn

[Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG]

la gleki wrote:
> ta'onaisai can you please explain how gimste was formed? Is it based on
> english semantics?
> Who and how selected sumti places? Was there anybody who looked at e.g.
> Chinese semantics and imported concepts from there?

Not this week. Maybe after the 25th anniversary LogFest.

> and a comparative reference grammar that discusses several dozen
> languages in more or less the same format of 10-50 page essays.
>
> I did a study of lexicography in the 1990s to learn how to write a
> proper dictionary.
>
> > But this is something that must be discussed further.
>
> NOTHING "must" be discussed further.
>
> Things must be DONE, not "discussed". Discussion is the enemy of
> getting things done.
>
> And proposing changes for discussion, as you seem to habitually do,
> makes paying attention to your proposals antithetical to getting things
> done.
>
> If you mean helping with CLL 1.1 i already expressed my opinion.

I have no particular reason to care about your opinion.

I was referring mostly to two threads you have initiated in the past
week, one proposing a complete change in the organization's priorities
for documentation when you clearly don't know what those priorities are
and why they were chosen. The other is the one with subject line:
Re: [lojban] Revising mu'ei and CAhA once again. Possible worlds.
to which you made no less than 7 posts on a topic that clearly sounds
like a change proposal without waiting for anyone else to respond. And
you invoke idiosyncrasies of TLI Loglan, guaspi and Ithkuil, as if they
have some relevance to Lojban. They don't.

No one is stopping you from writing Lojban with all manner of
idiosyncratic experimental cmavo derived from all sorts of weird
sources. But I won't understand such Lojban, and I won't even try, if I
am running into a lot of experimental stuff. Meanwhile, experimental
stuff is just that - experimental. It will not be included in the
formal documentation of the language, either 1.1 or 2.0, and probably
not in any teaching materials, either.

> As for rewriting cmavo definitions i dont understand how I can help.

If you don't understand, then probably you cannot help. No one has time
to figure out how to enable others to help. The current situation,
alas, is one in which one single person has to do a lot of work and
serves as a bottleneck until they have time to get done. But all other
approaches that we've tried have failed, because people with limited
time are more interested in discussing than in doing.

> Do you wish i presented a ma'oste with new definitions?

No.

> what would it change?
> everyone would ignore it.

I hope so.

I don't want any change to the cmavo list.

The concept of our baselines is that things DON'T change without a good
reason, and eventually that only changes will be officially adopted
after seeing lots of people actually use them in fluent conversation or
text, rather than talking about them as proposals for fiat change. If
your change is sufficiently non-evolutionary that it cannot be
introduced by usage without explanation (or maybe with minimal
explanation entirely in Lojban), it probably won't catch on.

[Jonathan Jones]

I'm only going to respond to this bit, because .lojbab.'s answer is similar to what I'd've said on the rest. Also, a fair warning: I tried, and completely, utterly failed, to be my usual polite self in my reply.

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 9:28 AM, la gleki <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

> But this is something that must be discussed further.

NOTHING "must" be discussed further.

Things must be DONE, not "discussed".  Discussion is the enemy of
getting things done.

And proposing changes for discussion, as you seem to habitually do,
makes paying attention to your proposals antithetical to getting things
done.

If you mean helping with CLL 1.1 i already expressed my opinion.

As for rewriting cmavo definitions i dont understand how I can help.

Do you wish i presented a ma'oste with new definitions? what would it change?

everyone would ignore it.

No, no, no, a thousand times no. Why on Earth would you ever think that a person who just expressed his complete and utter DISLIKE of DISCUSSION, specifically because it is a DISTRACTION from DOING, would you ever think he wants you to make any more suggestions?

He wants of you the same thing he wants of all of us- to shut up about our ideas, STOP trying to fix perceived faults in the language, and just stop endlessly debating how the language "ought" to be at least until the work that NEEDS TO BE DONE before any of those thing matter in the slightest GETS DONE.

Absolutely no changes will even be considered until that work is done, so any proposals are a waste of your breath and our time.

When the baseline is complete, and not before, is when proposals may be submitted for consideration- and there's a formal procedure for that, too. Until then, it is an utterly pointless activity.

Every jbopre goes through the "proposal" phase, but most of us get through it after one or two. You do one or two /a week/, and you've even said you have no desire whatsoever for an voice in the official determinations of the language, which makes one wonder what your reasons are, unless of course you're trying to get us all to debate endlessly on pointless crap that does nothing for the language.

[la gleki]

How can a language without defined system of subjunctives exists?

Subjunctives are absent in Lojban. It's not a change.

 

> As for rewriting cmavo definitions i dont understand how I can help.

If you don't understand, then probably you cannot help.  No one has time
to figure out how to enable others to help.  The current situation,
alas, is one in which one single person has to do a lot of work and
serves as a bottleneck until they have time to get done.  But all other
approaches that we've tried have failed, because people with limited
time are more interested in discussing than in doing.

> Do you wish i presented a ma'oste with new definitions?

No.

> what would it change?
> everyone would ignore it.

I hope so.

I don't want any change to the cmavo list.

You told earlier in this thread that cmavo definitions were broken. Are you denying it now?

[v4hn]

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 07:10:25PM -0700, Jonathan Jones wrote:
> He wants of you the same thing he wants of all of us- to shut up about our
> ideas, STOP trying to fix perceived faults in the language, and just stop
> endlessly debating how the language "ought" to be at least until the work
> that NEEDS TO BE DONE before any of those thing matter in the slightest
> GETS DONE.
>
> Absolutely no changes will even be considered until that work is done, so
> any proposals are a waste of your breath and our time.

Just to be clear about it: "that work" refers to (1) the work
described here http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Community+Work
to get on with the cmavo definitions for the baseline
and it refers to (2) the formatting issues in the CLL,
which ento (thank you for that!) just recently pushed to the github
cll issue tracker at https://github.com/dag/cll/issues
(AND everything that comes to Robin mind, whenever he's around...) ???
Both are fairly well defined tasks which could be done by anyone
with enough time and (for 1) an idea of what certain cmavo are about
or (for 2) some knowledge about how xml works and how to use git.

So yes gleki, you probably can take on something from these tasks and do that. {.ui}

However, as I look through the byfy sections nearly all of them appear blue,
which is supposed to mean "ready for voting". To me this looks like _there is_
currently work for the BPFK? This is surely no trivial work, but it is
well defined: "Read through the sections and vote on whether or not they are
coherent with how you understand lojban."
Will this happen in the near future so these sections get checkpointed?
Is the voting apparatus/process still up and running?
Are there members of the BPFK gone/away without official leave?
Would this hinder the voting?

Is there a list/a way to create a list of all missing cmavo,
which still need to be described? Without such a list, who is to know if
the baseline is complete?

> When the baseline is complete, and not before, is when proposals may be
> submitted for consideration- and there's a formal procedure for that, too.
> Until then, it is an utterly pointless activity.

Well, at least "perceived faults in the language" are documented somewhere
by then, so it's not totally pointless to write mails about them.
However, it probably doesn't make much sense to discuss problems which
require changes in the language definition, agreed.


v4hn

[Jonathan Jones]

On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 5:04 AM, v4hn <m...@v4hn.de> wrote:

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 07:10:25PM -0700, Jonathan Jones wrote:
> He wants of you the same thing he wants of all of us- to shut up about our
> ideas, STOP trying to fix perceived faults in the language, and just stop
> endlessly debating how the language "ought" to be at least until the work
> that NEEDS TO BE DONE before any of those thing matter in the slightest
> GETS DONE.
>
> Absolutely no changes will even be considered until that work is done, so
> any proposals are a waste of your breath and our time.

Just to be clear about it: "that work" refers to (1) the work
described here http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Community+Work
to get on with the cmavo definitions for the baseline
and it refers to (2) the formatting issues in the CLL,
which ento (thank you for that!) just recently pushed to the github
cll issue tracker at https://github.com/dag/cll/issues
(AND everything that comes to Robin mind, whenever he's around...) ???
Both are fairly well defined tasks which could be done by anyone
with enough time and (for 1) an idea of what certain cmavo are about
or (for 2) some knowledge about how xml works and how to use git.

So yes gleki, you probably can take on something from these tasks and do that. {.ui}

However, as I look through the byfy sections nearly all of them appear blue,
which is supposed to mean "ready for voting".

You're looking at the text, right, not the links, for which all of them are blue just to confuse us all?
 

To me this looks like _there is_
currently work for the BPFK? This is surely no trivial work, but it is
well defined: "Read through the sections and vote on whether or not they are
coherent with how you understand lojban."
Will this happen in the near future so these sections get checkpointed?
Is the voting apparatus/process still up and running?
Are there members of the BPFK gone/away without official leave?
Would this hinder the voting?

Those are all good questions, and my answers are, in order: I don't even know if we're bothering with the voting part or just implicitly accepting them as voted approved when they're made blue; yes, it's part of the wiki, you just have to add the poll to a page if you want voting on something in it; I don't know if there is a such thing as "official leave", but I'm pretty sure voting is a simple majority and we don't all have to vote at the same time, just whenever we get around to going to the poll and choosing our response, so it could take as much as a month to get all the votes depending on personal time constraints; not at all, no.
 

Is there a list/a way to create a list of all missing cmavo,
which still need to be described? Without such a list, who is to know if
the baseline is complete?

All existing cmavo are in one of the sections linked to on that page, and all the not blue/green sections have one or more missing cmavo /descriptions/ or other problems. So: black color section = needs work. red color section = /really/ needs work.
 

> When the baseline is complete, and not before, is when proposals may be
> submitted for consideration- and there's a formal procedure for that, too.
> Until then, it is an utterly pointless activity.

Well, at least "perceived faults in the language" are documented somewhere
by then, so it's not totally pointless to write mails about them.
However, it probably doesn't make much sense to discuss problems which
require changes in the language definition, agreed.


v4hn

[Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG]

la gleki wrote:
> No one is stopping you from writing Lojban with all manner of
> idiosyncratic experimental cmavo derived from all sorts of weird
> sources. But I won't understand such Lojban, and I won't even try,
> if I
> am running into a lot of experimental stuff. Meanwhile, experimental
> stuff is just that - experimental. It will not be included in the
> formal documentation of the language, either 1.1 or 2.0, and probably
> not in any teaching materials, either.
>
>
> How can a language without defined system of subjunctives exists?

By existing. As most languages do.

There is no universal that I know of stating that languages must have
"defined systems of subjunctives".

Subjunctive is an important feature of Romance languages, and is found
in some other IE languages, but isn't common outside IE. The concept is
almost completely fossilized in English (so while there is such a
concept embedded in parts of the language, it isn't especially
productive and thus useful only in explaining these fossilized exceptions).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_mood
"Every language has a formula for the unreal."

That is the universal, and it doesn't require a "system".
We have da'i for an explicit irrealis marker. Others might be understood
as irrealis (.ianai) XOR and other logical constructs REQUIRE that some
of the clauses therein are false. There are other Lojban usages that
mimic some of the moods mentioned on that Wikipedia page that are
specific to other languages.

The entire novel "Alice in Wonderland" was translated into Lojban, and
it is about as "unreal" as can be. If a subjunctive was necessary for
such a translation (note that I did NOT use the subjunctive "were",
which is no longer necessary in English), we would have already had to
add it.

> Subjunctives are absent in Lojban. It's not a change.

Of course it is. Adding to the language is a change. We've allowed for
ad-hoc creation of new lujvo and fu'ivla, and left space for
experimental cmavo, but there is no plan to formally adopt/approve any
of them in the near future. (brivla that see lots of actual usage will
of course eventually be added to dictionaries).

> > Do you wish i presented a ma'oste with new definitions?
>
> No.
>
> > what would it change?
> > everyone would ignore it.
>
> I hope so.
>
> I don't want any change to the cmavo list.
>
>
> You told earlier in this thread that cmavo definitions were broken. Are
> you denying it now?

No. I said that cmavo definitions did not exist. The cmavo list was
created primarily for use in the LogFlash flashcard program (as was the
gismu list). Lacking an actual dictionary for these words, when the
language was originally baselined, these lists became the effective
"definitions". But they were recognized to be completely inadequate.

I was for the longest time trying to write a dictionary, and couldn't
figure out how to significantly improve on the list. Cowan came up with
the concept of a selma'o catalog, which became CLL, as one step.

CLL was the attempt to provide the grammatical portion of the
definition, defining the selma'o. byfy was tasked with devising the
semantic definition of the cmavo, making reference to CLL as needed (and
byfy assumed the additional task of correcting CLL of its own volition).
It was NOT tasked with adding to or deleting from the cmavo list,
though likely some form of the byfy will eventually look at such
questions AFTER the existing baseline is done, and byfy has the
effective power to make changes if something in the language is so
broken that the definition process cannot be completed without a change
(this was the argument for xorlo).

It is the intent that such questions, when the come up, will be decided
through usage. So making proposals that are not reflective of actual
language usage is especially non-productive.

[Robert LeChevalier]

v4hn wrote:
> However, as I look through the byfy sections nearly all of them appear blue,
> which is supposed to mean "ready for voting". To me this looks like _there is_
> currently work for the BPFK? This is surely no trivial work, but it is
> well defined: "Read through the sections and vote on whether or not they are
> coherent with how you understand lojban."
> Will this happen in the near future so these sections get checkpointed?

I doubt it, but that is up to Robin.

Ah: Robin has explicitly marked the procedures section "obsolete"
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Procedures
and that probably applies to the community work page as well by implication.

> Is the voting apparatus/process still up and running?

No idea. But per the above, such votes are probably irrelevant. Robin
has the only real vote, until/unless he says otherwise.

> Are there members of the BPFK gone/away without official leave?

Yes. No one is required to have "official" leave. LLG has no
employees, only volunteers. And probably most of the BPFK has done
little or nothing over the many years of its existence, so it would be
hard to tell whether someone has "left". The original jatna. Nick
Nicolas, officially resigned that position. I don't think anyone else
has formally "left" byfy (and I don't remember that Nick even did so -
he resigned as jatna).

Robin has the power to add to or eliminate people from byfy membership.

> Would this hinder the voting?

Yes and no. None of the votes that *were* held, so far as I know,
attracted universal voting, and in many cases the calls for votes were
almost completely ignored. Few of the byfy had time to review the
proposals; if they were involved at all, they were too busy discussing
the controversial.

At one time LLG decisions were made in formal in-person meetings, with a
requirement for a quorum, and decisions got made (the meetings were
noted for being LOOONG, though). byfy was set up without a quorum
requirement, and has had trouble with decision-making because we cannot
get all of the byfy even thinking about the question at-hand in a timely
manner.

> Is there a list/a way to create a list of all missing cmavo,
> which still need to be described? Without such a list, who is to know if
> the baseline is complete?

Robin says when it is complete, and then there will be voting. Probably
at some point, the LLG voting membership will ratify the product of the
byfy as an official baseline (since the voting membership created byfy),
but I doubt that there will be any serious question when such a vote
goes to the membership.

>> When the baseline is complete, and not before, is when proposals may be
>> submitted for consideration- and there's a formal procedure for that, too.
>> Until then, it is an utterly pointless activity.
>
> Well, at least "perceived faults in the language" are documented somewhere
> by then, so it's not totally pointless to write mails about them.

I think the wiki is populated by all sorts of pages on perceived faults,
and that is probably the best place to record them. Email archives are
somewhat dependent on Google, and in any event are not indexed usefully,
so discussions of perceived faults in email is NOT particularly productive.

Of course I think it is somewhat presumptive for someone relatively new
to the language to "perceive fault". It is quite possible that there
are holes and faults in the language, but after 25 years, the ones that
actually matter will mostly be recognized by usage difficulties. So a
"perceived fault" is better expressed by a query "how do I say/translate
X", which those more experienced in the language can attempt to answer.

> However, it probably doesn't make much sense to discuss problems which
> require changes in the language definition, agreed.

It would probably make sense to do so, except that the odds that a
perceived problem will actually REQUIRE changes to the language
definition has become vanishingly small. So you need to express that in
the subjunctive zo'o to satisfy gleki.

lojbab

[Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG]

Jonathan Jones wrote:
> Those are all good questions, and my answers are, in order: I don't even
> know if we're bothering with the voting part or just implicitly
> accepting them as voted approved when they're made blue; yes, it's part
> of the wiki, you just have to add the poll to a page if you want voting
> on something in it; I don't know if there is a such thing as "official
> leave", but I'm pretty sure voting is a simple majority and we don't all
> have to vote at the same time, just whenever we get around to going to
> the poll and choosing our response, so it could take as much as a month
> to get all the votes depending on personal time constraints; not at all, no.

Actually, such votes are by consensus - we made it consensus minus 1 to
allow for bypassing a lone holdout. But a "no" vote requires an
explanation.

From the obsolete procedures page.
> Votes on non-administrative issues are consensus minus 1.
> Votes on administrative issues are 2/3 majority. A vote on an
> administrative issue may be called at any time by any member, and
> everyone, including the jatna, is bound by them. The jatna strongly
> prefers that you take any problems up with him first, however.

[la gleki]

I think you haven't read that thread  carefully.

My last posts has no proposals. In fact it's an integrations of already existing solutions.

There is da'i+va'o. There is {cumki} that Robin used.

There are TRANSLATIONS from other languages like Loglan and Ithkuil.

As for {mu'ei} it's not me who invented them. I just added them to the table so that more people could understand what was going on there.

I meant creating  a spreadsheet with old definitions in one column, definitions proposed by BPFK in another column.

Then we can analyse the list and make further improvements to the new definitions.