Roland Mainz writes: > Joseph Kowalski wrote: > > Its the "Cement Truck Syndrome". If Roland gets hit by a cement > > truck, we are left with an empty "turd". > > 1. I do not want to be hit by a cement truck. > 2. The ksh93-integration project has two leaders, e.g April Chin and /me > and David Korn and Glenn Fowler are there, too.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that you would want to be hit by a truck or anything related to that. And, no, the number of people involved or their standing in the community or world doesn't matter. The simple fact of life that Joe was trying to describe here is that people and thus whole project teams sometimes go away. They do so for a variety of reasons -- including redirecting the project to new goals, "finishing" the original goals, individuals finding new tasks or jobs or careers, and, yes, inevitably, leaving the mortal coil. When that happens, for any reason, they leave behind whatever things they'd half-finished. It's not possible to predict these events. Thus, there's a bias towards adding new things to the system *only* when you actually *need* them. Not when you think you might use them in the future, or can imagine others doing so with future projects, but rather when there's some immediate dependency that can be expressed. The alternative is to let projects (over time) contribute little "turds" to the system: things that aren't actually used, and perhaps should never be used, and that serve only to confuse the unwary. In this case, I think the email flood is (somewhat predictably) well in excess of the importance of the actual issue under discussion, so I'd like to see the thread die. It needs to be Godwin'd. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
