Matthew Garrett wrote:
> I'm on multiple spec bodies. If someone proposed an ammendment that
> allowed two conforming implementations to be entirely incompatible, and
> then argued that this was future proofing, they'd be laughed at.
The constraints actually relevant for compatibility are all specified very
clearly! E.g., there are some D-Bus methods, there is a string which takes
an icon name etc. Your implementation can look entirely different (that's
the point!), but it will still be COMPATIBLE.
>> And why do we have to specify common sense? It was obvious to everyone
>> involved that the bad implementation would be bad. Are you going to
>> require a spec on drawing circles to specify that the circumference of
>> the circle must be between 355/113-2^-21 and 355/113 times its diameter?
>> ^^
>
> The purpose of a spec is to *ensure* interoperability between different
> implementations. Any spec that relies on common sense is a bad spec.
So you WOULD specify the value of pi in your spec?! ^^
And the spec as is DOES ensure interoperability. It does not ensure visual
uniformity, by design. (Neither does the message-based notification spec
GNOME implements and recommends, by the way. The GNOME 3 message tray, the
Plasma notifier and the more traditional passive popup implementations used
elsewhere all implement the notification spec, yet look VERY different.)
And finally, even if the spec really were as badly written as you claim, it
would still be very much possible to interoperate with the actual
implementations. Samba was written without any spec at all, and unlike Samba
you even have the source code of the applications and workspaces you'd
interoperate with. So the quality of the spec is a very poor argument for
not being interoperable.
Kevin Kofler
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