Anton van Straaten <[email protected]> writes: > If the editors had been required to obtain formal approval from the > community for the various pieces as they were being developed, > variations on three desirable scenarios could have played out:
Both you and I would prefer greater community involvement, so I don't think we have a conflict. (Look no further than the very beginning of the R6RS editors' mailing-list archives as to the roots of the lack of it with R6RS.) However, I have yet to see a design process where community involvement is a substitute for a smaller group of people writing a coherent proposal. > There was a serious procedural problem with the R6RS process, in that > most of the people it was supposed to "make happy" did not have much > influence on the process. On this, I disagree. You're right that the formal influence was small. Yet, the editors spent a great amount of energy on trying to cater to comments made on the R6RS SRFIs as well as the formal comments, throwing overboard many proposals and aspects of the report dear to the heart of some of us. A prime example of the limits of happiness is, of course, the records, which apparently made many people unhappy. (And, to be perfectly clear, the aspects that made people most unhappy are due to me, not Kent Dybvig, on whom the incomplete and tendentious history section in SRFI 99 tries to push the blame.) Now, if you still have an open mind on this, I invite you to re-check the mailing-list archives of SRFI 76: http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-76/mail-archive/maillist.html If you look through the comments and the revision history, you can see that the community had significant influence on the design, and the editors (including you) made every effort to convey our intention to take community input into account. Morover, I invite you to look for the signs of outrage, and clear and unanimous unhappiness that the editors, as well as the clear and unanimous consensus on an alternative design. If it's there, I didn't see it at the time. If you think SRFI 76 was too early and insubstantial to be taken seriously by the community, I invite you to search among the formal comments for significant proposals for change of the records that were sufficiently timely so they could be taken into account. I see a number of formal comments that were accepted, some on minor syntactic aspects, and Will Clinger's formal comment #90, which foreshadows Will's universal disenchantment with the R6RS record. However, Will only made a concrete proposal to address the problem very late in the process, and (while Kent Dybvig pushed for making Will's proposed changes), the editors as a whole (probably, again, at my insistence) felt the risk of making these changes so late was too great. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions on "happiness". Design a record system - see if makes *me* happy. -- Cheers =8-} Mike Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
