On Wed, 31 Oct 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In a posting a few days ago, Laura Conrad spoke first of the > difficulties of achieving agreement on a standard and then spoke of the > sort of the sort of open-source project that she would like to see. I > took these as one topic reflecting more of the same association of > standard and software project and used my now notorious "outlaw" > reference. She then said that she was simply making two separate points > in the same email and I (if you recall) apologised. I may have been a > little premature in doing so as, since then, Richard Robinson and others > have argued that the development of the abc standard should be > associated with a software project.
I have reviewed all my postings to this thread, since Laura's comments and before. I can't find any such statements. I don't see a conflict, actually. A spec. "should" describe how software behaves, software "should" behave as described, and wouldn't it be nice if the thousand flowers could converge on a single description ? Writing code and writing documentation are not unrelated, but they're not identical skills either; lots of people are better at one than the other, and lots of people _are_ invloved, in whatever way is accessible to them. Even if it be arguing the toss about priorities on the mailing list ... My feeling is that things are likely to go better when people are scratching the itches that they actually feel. If somebody proposes that they might write some code, I presume they have thought for themselves about what they could do, and that that is what they think best, and I prefer to accept that rather than getting upset because they're not scratching whatever itch I'm feeling. I think John's comments, yesterday, sum things up pretty well, as regards software and/or specification. -- Richard Robinson "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
