On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 16:27 -0500, John Dennis wrote: > 4) It's none of your business how I implement something as long as its > not broken. Forcing every spec file to replace $RPM_SOURCE_DIR with > $SOURCEn is consistency without merit. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote > "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" It's my choice as > to what constitutes a maintainable spec file based on value judgments > and experience. > It's interesting that you quote Emerson as he has several points which bear on the present discussion. Here's the paragraph the quote is from:: ''' A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. ''' In this section Emerson is not, as you imply, telling us to forgo conformity to a standard (he talks about that elsewhere in the essay), rather he is telling us not to hold ourselves hostage to our own past decisions. We should feel free to change our mind if today we don't agree with what we wrote yesterday. A "foolish consistency" is an idea or decision which we made in the past and continue to espouse even though we realize it doesn't agree with our current ideas or understanding of the situation. tibbs has already pointed out that many community reviewers have expressed a fear that Red Hat'ers will hold to their past packaging decisions so tightly that they will be unwilling to change their packages when presented with the changes that need to be made. It's still a bit early to tell if this fear is well-founded but the reviews so far make me hopeful that this is a groundless fear. I have also observed that some packagers both within and without Red Hat fear that the Packaging Committee is married to its own decisions and that there's no way to get bad decisions reverted. This is not true. If there's something in the guidelines that you think should be changed, please submit proposals for changes along with details of why the change needs to be made so that the issue can be considered. It's possible your arguments hadn't been thought of when the guideline was written and the packaging committee will remove or reword the guideline. (It's also possible that the packaging committee already discussed that aspect and felt the arugments for the other side outweighed them. Look through the mailing list archives if you want to see if that's the case.) ''' " 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' " Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ''' In the second half of this paragraph Emerson points out why it is that we, as open-source developers and packagers, need to value consistency. Consistency is an aid to understanding. It helps reviewers understand what's going on in your spec file and it helps future maintainers of the package understand that the deviations from the consistent approach were done for a good reason that they had best understand. Otherwise your important changes are lost in the noise of small, personal, stylisitc touches. -Toshio
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