Actually some of the most recent mail on the Cabal list (where there has recently been *very* little activity) was to question whether it should simply disband itself.
And I notice (with a smile) that nobody seems to have bothered to answer the question - or was that in itself an answer!? Laurie ----- Original Message ----- From: John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 4:09 PM Subject: Re: [abcusers] Progress towards a new abc standard Bryan Creer just thought he'd ask: | John Chambers recently said - | >But it's possible that we could put it to a vote, | | How would this be administered? Who would get a vote? Just the BIG 6? Only | developers? Anybody who wants to? | | >But again, it's not topic of major importance. More important is that | >we get some action making this sort of ending part of the published | >abc standard syntax. | | Published where? The central point of contact for abc is Chris Walshaw's abc | home page. It is referenced widely in abc sites across the internet. Are | there arrangements for updating the standard held there or do you envision | setting up an alternative standard? Do you intend to co-operate with Guido | Gonzato or would his be a third separate standard? Well, that's a rather elegant summary of the usual problems. There is an "ABC committee" (which I thought should have called itself the "ABC cabal"), but their generally agreed policy has always been that any decisions would be put to a vote on abcusers. Then they wandered off in the direction of first codifying the 1.6 pseudo-standard, and that's sorta where things hang now. The rules for a vote have never been codified, to my knowledge. There's enough precedence on other lists and newsgroups that we could probably work out our own rules in short order, if we wanted to. Part of this was Chris's comment that he didn't particularly want to be the active center of such discussions, and he suggested a cabal, uh, committee, to give some coordination to the effort. Anyway, it's pretty clear that there's no intent to try to keep any discussion private. And there has been much more discussion on this list than in the standards list. It may be that the standards list will go the way of the old abc developers' list, which seems to have died out mostly because all the developers preferred an open discussion among all users. You'd think that there would be separate discussions of implementation details, but even there, the implementers prefer to discuss ideas here. This is probably because abcusers isn't such a high-volume list that "mere users" feel the need to expell the geeks to their own list. This is usually why a separate experts list gets created, not for any sort of privacy or exclusion, but simply to limit the flood of email. My impression is that Guido is also willing to coordinate his efforts with others; he just decided to do something because he didn't see any others doing it. This is also the motive behind a lot of the independent development of ABC extensions, including mine. "I need this now, and those nice folks on abcusers don't seem to be able to settle any of the issues. They just keep wandering off into picky details and attempts to solve all the world's musical problems, and nothing ever gets decided. So I'll just do it myself and maybe some day they'll catch up." Chide, chide ... ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
