On 10/11/2013 08:13, Ted Lemon wrote: > On Nov 9, 2013, at 2:02 PM, Pete Resnick <presnick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Engineering is hard. We've got to do that. Coming to consensus over the engineering tradeoffs is also hard; there's no one-liner like, "We always go with the running code". As the document says, the "running code" bit of the mantra is that we value actual practical experience over theoretical models. But running code is not itself some sort of magical thing. We still have to do the rest of engineering and come to consensus on whether we've gotten it "right". And I do think the document says that much. I don't think it should go much further. > > Nicely put, Pete (the rest, too). This pretty much captures my discomfort with the "running code" line of discussion. Yes. Depending on where a particular document or technology has got to, we may seek rough consensus that the idea seems promising, or that the specification seems complete and implementable, or that it has reached widespread deployment and seems stable, just to mention three out of many possibilities. Rough consensus is our method, but running code is our target. Brian