Rich Freeman posted on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:12:37 -0400 as excerpted: > This whole thing seems best chalked up to well-intending people making > omissions (maybe), and the virtue of competent developers who don't just > blindly follow the spec when it doesn't make sense.
Actually, much as it's widely agreed there's value in porting an app to at least one other arch even if there's not enough potential users there to justify it directly, because it helps to root out and get bugs fixed that would never be found otherwise, I'd say the same applies here: There's value in someone being just contrarian enough to purposefully look for the strangest or most illogical read of a spec and (initially) implement it that way, in ordered to root out and get the bugs in the spec fixed. That said... > Sure, fix the spec, but it makes more sense to make this retroactive > unless somebody can really point to something that this breaks. Agreed. Once the bug has been demonstrated and a fix to the spec is in process, the value of a contrarian read of the existing spec has been exploited and there's no longer any value in it. Just fix it (both the spec and the contrarian implementations), as soon as possible (and possibly retroactively for the spec), which given the nature of specifications and the bureaucracy which surrounds them, will by definition tend to be sooner for the implementation than for the spec, a fix for which will take its time to work thru the bureaucracy. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
