Unity For Fedora (As in OpenSUSE or Arch)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 11:00:52PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > A spec that allows two conformant implementations to differ to such a
> > degree that it's impossible for an application to work sensibly in both
> > implementations is a *bad* *spec*. The only argument anyone had against
> > that was "Oh, nobody would implement the spec in that way", which is
> > another huge blaring warning that it's a bad spec. There was a simple
> > and straightforward way of handling this, which was to rewrite the
> > problematic parts of the specification in order to constrain
> > implementations. But nobody bothered, and so it continues to be a bad
> > spec.
> 
> It's not a bad spec, it's a future-safe spec!

I'm on multiple spec bodies. If someone proposed an ammendment that 
allowed two conforming implementations to be entirely incompatible, and 
then argued that this was future proofing, they'd be laughed at.

> And why do we have to specify common sense? It was obvious to everyone 
> involved that the bad implementation would be bad. Are you going to require 
> a spec on drawing circles to specify that the circumference of the circle 
> must be between 355/113-2^-21 and 355/113 times its diameter? ^^

The purpose of a spec is to *ensure* interoperability between different 
implementations. Any spec that relies on common sense is a bad spec.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org