To semi-rolling or not to semi-rolling, that is the question...

[Doug Ledford]

On 03/04/2010 06:27 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Doug Ledford wrote:
>> But let's be clear.  That's a *policy* decision.  One of the things that
>> got very confusing in the previous thread(s) was the intermixing of
>> policy decisions and technical issues.  For instance, Kevin's response
>> to my proposal was all about technical issues he saw.  Technical issues
>> are almost always solvable if you have a specific policy you are trying
>> to implement.  So one thing I think people should keep in mind is that
>> policy decisions should always lead to technical decisions, *not* the
>> other way around.  We should decide what we want ourselves to be and
>> what our policies are, and then that should guide our infrastructure,
>> our tools, our work flows, and our processes.  We should never allow
>> things to flow in the reverse direction.  We should never allow a
>> current tooling limitation to set our policy, modulo that our policy
>> should acknowledge and accommodate for the time necessary for tooling
>> changes to take place or for the limitations of our resources.
> 
> I heavily disagree with that assertion. We need to always keep the technical 
> and practical limitations in mind when deciding on a policy.

Limitations, yes.  Current state, no.  You can't make a policy to do the
impossible and expect it to just happen.  But you *can* make a policy to
do the very hard and seemingly impossible and make it happen.  To that
end I reference the fact that man has in fact been to the moon and it
was a policy mandate by two competing governments that caused us (as a
species) to do the work to get there.  Deciding that a policy is good is
the first step to being willing to commit to the work to implement it.

> It doesn't make 
> sense to enact a policy which cannot be realized due to technical 
> limitations, or whose realization causes unsolvable problems. The technical 
> details are essential.

You only need enough details to know that it isn't impossible, not
enough to know the exact route to get to the end goal.

> Only a policy with a good technical implementation 
> can be a good policy.

In the end, this is true.  In the beginning, it is not.

[ snip the remainder of your non-reply ]

Please, if you have objections to the policy, then state them.  What I
got from your email is you objected to me saying set policy first,
technical implementation later, and then you never once said anything
about the policy nor the technical implementation.  Should I then take
your silence on those issues to mean that you are OK with the policy and
OK with the proposed technical implementation?

-- 
Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>
              GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
	      http://people.redhat.com/dledford

Infiniband specific RPMs available at
	      http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband

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