From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Fri May 10 2002 - 08:07:11 CDT
In <878z6thore.fsf@erlenstar.demon.co.uk> Andrew Gierth <andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk> writes:
>It's specifically a Bad Idea to publish a standard (and the fact that
>it is only 'proposed' makes no difference in this case) which is such
>that an implementor, following the standard carefully, will produce an
>implementation which would then require substantial changes to make it
>usable with existing software.
But I do not accept that is the case, except in a few cases where the
existing software is broken according to the present standards and
practice.
I will grant that implementors of software have some work to do before
they can claim compliance with the new standard, but we always accepted
that there would be some catching up to do.
>Not enough attention is being paid to the lessons learned from
>son-of-1036, where virtually every "new" feature had to be removed
>either because it was never significantly implemented (like
>Article-Names) or because it was actively dangerous (like
>Also-Control).
Yes, but the reason the "new" features were never significantly
implemented was because that draft never made it to a standard. There's
chickens and there's eggs. You have to break the cycle somewhere.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5