On Jul 28, 2015 10:41 PM, "Stephen J. Turnbull" stephen@xemacs.org wrote:
Ben Finney writes:
I've made a clear distinction between the need to *be able to* justify a change, versus arbitrary demands to do so by arbitrary members.
The latter is what you're arguing against, and of course I agree. I've never advocated that.
Sure, but the former, when stated as a rule rather than induced from past cases, is also an unacceptably high bar. It's unnecessarily high, because this is open source. No mistake is irrecoverable, even if it happens in a public release. One can always keep using the last release one liked.<wink/> Or maintain a local fork. Or switch to a different language. Or <gasp/> live with the misfeature.
The other face is that it's impossibly high. Some decisions can't be justified rationally, because the theory isn't developed until later, typically based on experience with an intuitively-approved feature. In the end, some decisions really do come down to somebody's "gut feeling".
As I've already said, in the case of "assret" I *personally* think the demands of accountability were higher than the mere repetition of "it's a minor design decision" could satisfy. Nevertheless, I wouldn't try to enunciate a rule.
* sorry, I haven't the context for this: would -m compileall or an AST preprocess help catch speling mistakes as well as syntax highlighting? * If the constraints are ill-defined, there are not enough tests; "Fearless Refactoring"
Steve
Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe:
https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/wes.turner%40gmail.com