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
>
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