Re: how to be more careful

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

> It seems to me that the process by which some open source projects are
> developed has a serious bug -- Guile is a fine example of this bug in
> action.

The bug does seem real, but I have deep suspicions about the extent to
which a layer of process will fix the bug.  

Among other things, many decisions seem too small to warrant the
process.  But it can be hard to know that in advance, for it might
turn out that the decision will have been hugely important, though it
seemed small at the time.

Also, some decisions don't really need to be made; creating a process
that pretends to consider every suggestion runs the risk that way too
much time will be spent on pointless suggestions.

There are a lot of people who think the way to avoid programming bugs
is layers of careful code review process.  I think those people are
essentially incorrect.  Your proposal sounds to me like "code review"
as a way of solving not programming bugs, but a social process bug,
and I fear that it would gum up progress the way code reviews tend to.