One of the things that really messes up the democratic process in the U.S. is the concept of "riders". I.e. overloading a bill with little petty special interest group junk added on to an otherwise acceptable bill. They get there because congressmen conspire and say "I'll vote for this as long as you add this rider" so that they special interest groups get satisfied. How else would a government with over a trillion dollar debt fund research on cow flatulence?
The reason I am bringing this up is that in the interest of making it clear what exactly we are voting for. In a JIRA comment for bug EXLBR-3, Stephen asserts that when we accepted Meta as a package we would distribute it had the consequence that it would become the defacto standard and define several items to which there was no official vote. These are riders, and they have serious consequences. It is a dangerous practice, whether intentional or not.
I highly recommend that the Avalon group do all that they can to review all the implications of the Meta package and see if they agree with them. If not, then Meta must change. In the future, it would be highly beneficial to declare openly any implications that the vote has. This was not done for Avalon Meta.
Had it been clear that the adoption of Avalon Meta would entail so many implicit acceptance of *its* standards, it would probably still be in the sandbox.
Am I saying that the standards it imposes are bad? No. I am saying it was not obvious from the vote what we were voting for. That is bad. Personally, I could care less if the context directory is called "context-dir", "urn:avalon:context", or "I am an idiot". As long as I have something to find what I need, then all is well.
Take a stock and write up on the wiki all the standards that are implicit and explicit, and weed through them. I think that with the current state of things no one really knows what they all are. If you don't know what you are supporting, or developing toward you may create a new standard that conflicts with an existing one, which is bad. Please put all the standards in ONE PLACE. If you have to go from page to page to find out what they are, then you are spelling disaster for yourself.
I guarantee you will find conflicting standards (i.e. Fortress followed Pheonix context naming standards--Merlin was not official then), and then do a quick vote to resolve them. Remove the dependencies on the old standards so that you can move forward.
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