Mailing-List: contact general-help@incubator.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2002 08:58:39 -0500
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v546)
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Subject: veto - oops
From: Ben Hyde <bhyde@pobox.com>
To: general@incubator.apache.org
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-Id: <2EC9EE77-F322-11D6-BE35-003065CC5042@pobox.com>

I recently wrote:
 > The second bold bit is just wrong, at least in my village of of Apache
 > land.

That's wrong.

 > In HTTPD we have a convention that if you veto you have
 > responsibility to work to resolve the issue, otherwise - get out of 
the
 > way.  Again there is plenty of wiggle room around that convention and 
I
 > suspect there is a much higher statement of the convention someplace.

That's right.

Since force(convention) < force(rule).

This has become an convention only because we have tended to have some 
baseline of politeness, and it's arguable that force(polite) < 
force(convention).

I prefer to reside in the land were quantity(polite) is high and 
quantity(rule) is low.

Thanks to those who brought this mistake to my attention.

Sam's question: does the paragraph in question "do no harm" is still an 
interesting one.  At this point I'm not sure if we have ever had a rule 
- i.e. something written down that people adopting the role of umpire 
could point at and say "see - look! that's the rule!"  About what 
responsibilities come with a veto.  We may well have only had 
politeness or convention.  If that's correct making up such rules would 
be going outside our brief.

It's a subtle distinction, but I think an important one.  This effort 
should attempt to say "It's been noticed that most of the time we do 
X." rather than "We have a rule that you do X."  That gets you most of 
the value of behavior X - and helps new players to know that X is a 
useful design pattern - without running the risk that once in a blue 
moon X is a very bad idea.

  - ben