On 19/04/2011 14:47, Russel Winder wrote:
On Tue, 2011-04-19 at 06:13 -0500, Caligo wrote:
[ . . . ]
I would like to make a comment if that's okay. If a person is not an
expert on parallelism, library development, or we can't verify his or
her background and such, I don't see why their vote should count. I'm
not voting because I'm just an ordinary D user, and I have no
expertise in parallelism. And since this a public vote, if would be
great if people who are voting did not hide behind an alias, such as
bearophile.
I think there is an very interesting and important issue here. There
are really four (or more/less) roles of people who might vote:
Has detailed knowledge of implementation and usage.
Has some knowledge of implementation and/or usage.
Perhaps just using the API.
No actual interest.
And then there are:
Sock puppet aka shill
Troll
but let's ignore them.
Although the general belief is "one person, one vote", some decisions
are best influenced by considering the weighting to a vote provided by
annotating with role.
Two cases perhaps highlight this:
If a person using the library but having no knowledge of the
implementation finds a problematic API issue then this should count as
much as any view of people more knowledgeable about the internals.
If a person without knowledge of the theory and practice votes yes where
the domain experts are able to argue there is a blocking problem, then
the person leading the vote should have the option of cancelling and
re-entering review even if there was a clear majority vote for.
I think the issue here is not to be bound too rigidly by votes and
statistics, this is not after all politics, but instead to ensure that
everyone has the right sort of say about these things and that the
majority of people always feel the right decisions are getting made.
Consider the system not being one of the review leader managing the
votes, but of the review leader having a single golden vote which then
has to be justified by argumentation.
P.S.
I can't wait for std.parallelism to become part of Phobos.
Me too.
I generally agree with this perspective, being aware of this issue, and
not making the voting completely democratic (that's why I'm not voting
on this one). On the other hand, one would also hope that those with D's
best interest in mind will also be mindful of this, and not vote if they
feel they have insuficient knowledge to evaluate the proposal. In other
words, one would hope the community would self-regulate to avoid this
problem, and no formal additional rules should be needed. Let's see.
In any case it seems this won't matter for this proposal, everyone is
voting yes :) . But it's worthwhile to keep in mind for the future.
--
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
