Nathan Torkington wrote:
> This lets us satisfy these goals:
> * open process, both for visible and participation
> * small team doing the design (elephant is a mouse designed by
> committee, etc)
How are you going to publish the design? Asking people to follow email
discussions and try to piece together what is proposed from that doesn't
seem a very optimal way to go about it. How about a design document
(format to be decided) and a 'design + commentary' document which is the
design document with the condensed email discussion inserted into it as
the commentary. That way there is a design spec for the implementation,
but also the 'why we did it that way' is captured for posterity.
Mailing lists are OK for having the discussion, but aren't very good for
recording it for posterity. I'm inspired by the perl5 digest produced
by Simon, which I think is a really, really useful thing - you can use
it to get the essence of what went on and why, and then drill down to
the meat if you need to.
Alan Burlison
