Doing it right

[Stephen McKay]

On Monday, 15th March 2004, Dag-Erling =?iso-8859-1?q?Sm=F8rgrav?= wrote:

>Sorry, but you get zero points for criticizing this decision after the
>fact when it had already been discussed to death ...

Presumably it was discussed to death on the -sparc list that I don't read.

It's easy to miss things.  You have to ignore 99% of the stuff that goes by
if you want to avoid livelock.  I responded to the commit of UPDATING.64BTT,
which looked alarming to me.  Turns out it isn't.

I don't believe it is ever too late to do more thinking about a difficult
problem.  I've seen plenty of bad ideas pushed through because "we're tired
of talking about it now" or because someone wanted "action, not words".

>Now, if your message had been something like the following, this
>thread might have turned out very differently:
>
>  "Are you planning something similar for i386?  In that case, I think
>   we should place more emphasis on backward compatibility..."

So you are basically agreeing with my general premise (criticising technical
decisions is a contribution), but didn't like the wording of my initial
message?  If so, fine.  I take care when I write to the lists, but I can't
get every nuance perfect.  I think Garance read it the way it was intended.

If you think that only code (or documentation and other concrete things)
is a contribution, then I disagree, and will debate this further.

Stephen.