> Once there are known holes in the theory, it's not a > scientific theory. At best it's an approximation, but > quite possibly it's just plain wrong. You are right about scientific theory, but specs are not just a theory. You are mixing "discovery" and "invention". A scientific theory has to match reality, because the universe deveops independently. There is no way you can enforce your theory down the throat on the "nature". But the roles of specs are more than that. There are two parts of it: 1. unify/summarize the reality 2. guide future implementations on a unified road It might do job 1 poorly (simply because the reality is a mess), but if everyone from the point on puts the effort to follow it, job 2 can be done, and it is the real goal. It can do this simply because *humans* can collaborate and be influenced for a goal that could eventually benefit everybody. > And that's my point. Specs are not only almost invariably > badly written, they also never actually match reality. > > At which point at _best_ it's just an approximation. At > worst, it's much worse. At worst, it causes people to > ignore reality, and then it becomes religion. Let me add more to the moron/asshole argument: Anyone that thinks specs are reality is a moron. Anyone that thinks specs are useless and refuses to collaborate is an asshole. :) - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
