I recently wrote:
> The second bold bit is just wrong, at least in my village of of Apache
> land.
That's wrong.
> In HTTPD we have a convention that if you veto you have
> responsibility to work to resolve the issue, otherwise - get out of
the
> way. Again there is plenty of wiggle room around that convention and
I
> suspect there is a much higher statement of the convention someplace.
That's right.
Since force(convention) < force(rule).
This has become an convention only because we have tended to have some
baseline of politeness, and it's arguable that force(polite) <
force(convention).
I prefer to reside in the land were quantity(polite) is high and
quantity(rule) is low.
Thanks to those who brought this mistake to my attention.
Sam's question: does the paragraph in question "do no harm" is still an
interesting one. At this point I'm not sure if we have ever had a rule
- i.e. something written down that people adopting the role of umpire
could point at and say "see - look! that's the rule!" About what
responsibilities come with a veto. We may well have only had
politeness or convention. If that's correct making up such rules would
be going outside our brief.
It's a subtle distinction, but I think an important one. This effort
should attempt to say "It's been noticed that most of the time we do
X." rather than "We have a rule that you do X." That gets you most of
the value of behavior X - and helps new players to know that X is a
useful design pattern - without running the risk that once in a blue
moon X is a very bad idea.
- ben
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