Frank Tobin has generously given me permission to forward his comments to this list. ------- Forwarded Message Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 00:31:42 -0600 (CST) From: Frank Tobin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Response to Critique of Perl 6 RFC Process Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I appreciated reading your critique of the RFC process. I think one problem that contributed to the mess of "mishandled" RFC's was that there were no real written guidelines on what authors should do with RFC's in various circumstances. For example, when should an RFC be withdrawn? How about withdrawn? Does withdrawn mean the RFC should be revoked because there is something inherently bad about (e.g., wanting a perfect data structure), or can it also mean the RFC is simply heavily disliked? Does frozen mean "it looks good, let's go for it", or does it mean "no further changes will improve the RFC". >From personal experience, I was the maintainer of RFC 357 (Perl should use XML for docs instead of POD). This generated a lot of criticism/debate. In general it seemed like the heavy majority of the Perl community was against it. I decided to mark the RFC as frozen, while adding a section in the RFC about how the RFC was against it (although I didn't go into much detail, I admit). I decided against withdrawing it, because I felt there wasn't anything inherently wrong about the RFC; it was just disliked. The problem seemed that "withdrawn" and "frozen" weren't orthogonal choices. Perhaps one problem was that there was only one field for the status of an RFC. Perhaps two were needed. One of these would be "Closure: Open/Closed", which would indicate the activeness of the RFC, and the other would be "Resolution: Popular/Unpopular/AlreadyDone/Impossible/etc". Maybe this would've given maintainers the ability to better describe the status of the RFC; I know it would've made my choice easier. - - -- Frank Tobin http://www.uiuc.edu/~ftobin/ - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (FreeBSD) Comment: pgpenvelope 2.9.0 - http://pgpenvelope.sourceforge.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAjoBClUACgkQVv/RCiYMT6MBMwCfe0povtY/42rca0qn9E+Sc6pb 7UgAoK7YQ6gp61LjdgZvDXFD77Oao6Gv =xn0j - -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------- End of Forwarded Message
