From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Sun Apr 29 2001 - 23:53:37 CDT
Brad Templeton <brad@templetons.com> writes:
> That's a reason to support extensibility! The whole point of designing
> for extensibility is that you don't know the problems, or solutions, of
> the future, so you design as best you can to allow new features and
> experimentation without fear of breaking older software.
The correct way to support extensibility is not to make up as many
different solutions as we can think of and throw them all into a standard
in the hope that when one of those unforseen problems comes up it will
happen to luckily coincide with one of those solutions.
Show me a useful local header. Show me someone who wanted this feature
and couldn't find any other, better way of solving their problem. Once we
have a concrete example, *then* we can have a meaningful discussion over
whether this is a good idea and, if so, how to implement it. Until we
have an application, this is just innovation for innovation's sake. I'm
extremely suspicious of innovation for innovation's sake; nine times out
of ten when one goes to solve a real problem, all that innovation turns
out to have subtle problems that make it worthless.
Xref doesn't count as a local header, since Xref also exists to support
slaving and therefore can't always be deleted when it leaves the news
server.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>