veto - oops

[Ben Hyde <bh...@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

Re: veto - oops

[Ben Hyde <bh...@pobox.com>]

>>  "It's been noticed that most of the time we do X." ...
>
> ... "best practices statement" ...

I'm too melancholy a guy to label what I'm doing "best".
"pretty-good practices(tm)"

Re: veto - oops

[Stephen McConnell <mc...@apache.org>]

Ben Hyde wrote:

> 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.


If this is positioned as something like a "best practices statement" as 
distinct from a "voting policy", a best practices statement could  be 
something that a project embrasses or even endorces in conjunction with 
a more formal position concerning applicable policy.  The distinction 
may enable the introduction of that subtle difference between a rule and 
an expection of reasonable conduct.

Cheers, Steve.

>
>  - ben
>
>
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-- 

Stephen J. McConnell

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