What Larry is saying - or at least, what I'm agreeing with,
regardless of whether Larry meant this or not - is that if
you've a bunch of people saying "I've implemented this in
production, and X needs to be Y", then that is a very hard
argument to beat.
I didn't mean that. I think arguments need to be founded on technical
justifications; claims of results backed by open, reproducible data.
What I meant was that the "rough" in "rough consensus" is that non-implementor
complaints shouldn't carry as much weight if all the implementors agree; you
should listen to non-implementors and make sure that the agreement is based on
technical judgment and not entirely on market or legacy considerations.
I have (unfortunately) been in working group meetings where none of the
implementers were present. Even if EVERYONE agrees, EVERYONE hums yes, I
wouldn't call it "rough consensus", because the real implementors weren't there.
Larry
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http://larry.masinter.net