Re: comment about gnome architecture

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 23:20, Greg Breland wrote:
> Thanks, I think you just won a year+ debate for me I was having with
> several other programmers.  Made my day.
> 
> I consider specs the infrastructure more so than the actual
> implementation of the spec, which will get done when it is really needed
> or re-written if it was done badly the first time keeping compatibility
> with the first version as much as possible.  Worse case even a bad spec
> moves the ball down the field and makes a good spec easier to write.

I don't understand your opinions on this. A bad spec is as bad, or worse
than some bad software written without a spec. This is obvious, since
there will be software written against the bad spec, and software
written with no spec could become software written against a good spec
if the software was good and someone documented its behaviour as a spec.

I'm not saying specs are bad, they are great. But its much more
important that specs are good than that software is good, because specs
will (hopefully) be implemented by several apps, meaning badness in the
spec will affect more users/developers/sysadmins.

This is why writing good specs is important, and why some random person
writing a bad spec is really bad IMHO. Idealy the person working on it
needs to have lots of experience developing and supporting the sort of
software the spec is about. This of course makes it very hard to find
good spec-writing people.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a leather-clad voodoo dog-catcher with nothing left to lose. She's an 
orphaned hip-hop safe cracker from aristocratic European stock. They fight 
crime!