Re: comment about gnome architecture

[Greg Breland <gbreland mozillanews org>]

Ok, I think I see where we are looking at this from different
directions, seeing the same thing but coming to different conclusions.

This whole thread started off talking about infrastructure and then went
to specs are infrastructure.  We are not talking about specifications
for writing a program, but specs for services the operating system
provides to programs.

The spec tells the program how to receive and provide services to the
operating system in a consistent manor, whether that be saving/reading
bookmarks, thumbnails or adding/listing fonts.

I don't think the existence or absence of a spec would in anyway
determine the success or failure of software being developed because the
specs being used would be such a small part of the application. 
However, specs make the application more useful with not much effort.

If you were referring to writing the implementation of a spec that
requires software, fontconfig for example, then yes, a bad spec could
mean that the software fails.  But how is this bad?  Do you think the
software would have succeeded if there was no spec?

Greg Breland

On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 13:27, Larry W. Virden wrote:

> However, my reasoning is this: bad software without a spec means that
> in the best case, the bad software is unique and only the users of
> that software suffer.  In the worse case, one or more others feel that,
> for whatever reason, the bad software is going to serve the purpose of
> a 'spec' and they will make attempts to code new software to match
> the perceived behavior of the bad softwar.e
> 
> Bad specs means that, for a certainty, all attempts to create software
> to meet the specs are going to have to either match the bad specs,
> and try to become good despite that bad beginning, or they will fail
> to meet the specs, either due to bad programming or surrendering to the
> inevidebility of the poor quality of the specs and just beginning work
> on another spec.