Re: CVS commit: src/sys

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost>]

On Sun, Jun 24, 2007 at 02:18:24AM +0300, Elad Efrat wrote:
> Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> 
> >Sometimes people change their minds.  Sometimes it takes them some
> >time to decide to change their minds.
> 
> I have heard this argument before and my answer to it remains the
> same: when a technical decision is "to break" or "not to break",
> it doesn't take a genius to choose between the two. :)

Would you prefer, then, that if someone makes a decision to (in your
opinion) "break", they not revisit that decision?

It's the real world.  Not you, not me, not nobody is ever going to be
happy with every decision anyone else ever makes.  Expect (or insist) to
be and you're just guaranteeing yourself a lifetime of frustration.  But,
on the other hand, for my part at least, when I can persuage people that
they got it wrong and should change their minds, I'm pretty happy -- I'm
not really sure what else one can reasonably expect (and because it is the
real world, not an ideal world, I can't reasonably expect to even always
get even that).

> >I have a tremendous amount of difficulty understanding why this is any
> >kind of problem, rather than as simply the usual give-and-take, including
> >mistakes, corrections, and so forth, that inevitably occurs in any large
> >software project.
> 
> I'll help you understand, then.
> 
> in a large software project, where multiple people are working on
> various parts of the tree, a certain amount of coordination and
> cooperation is required to ensure -- especially to the users -- that
> the state of the tree remains stable as possible, and no one subsystem
> or design decisions step on the toes of another. in case where this is
> inevitable, a technical decision is required to choose whose toes go on
> top.

Sure.  I'm not sure, though, what that has to do with the inevitable fact
that some decisions will be made once, turn out to be wrong, and need to
be revisisted.

You say later in your message (snipped as this is already getting rather
long) that you wish technical changes would "go up for public discussion".
It looks to me like that's precisely what's happening here, and also like
the most probable outcome is that David's change will be reworked so that
the kauth interface stays opaque.

So what's the problem?

Thor