Re: @avalon

Peter Royal wrote:
> I see you & Berin's point Stephen, and I see Pete's. Both are valid. I 
> think a third strategy might be a proper compromise, and allow us to 
> move forward.

+1

there are good arguments either way. The problem is in settling on 
whether an abstraction is leaky or not. It is very *hard* to create a 
completely non-leaky abstraction; in fact it is probably impossible in a 
totally generic system.

Thus the problem we face is a choice in what can reasonably be 
considered general in avalon's solution space.

Look at any current or feature system that attempts to deal with stuff 
like this, and you will find conceptual compromise throughout. The 
questions then are

- are we willing to invest the time and energy neccessary to reach 
compromise?
- how are we going to go about finding that compromise?
- what do we do on failure to reach it?

Clearly, we tackled the problem the wrong way back in september, given 
the resulting 4 or 5 competing proposals which are distributed across 
cvses and projects, the flamewars, etc etc. The idea I guess a few of us 
have is that because of that failure, we're going to keep things 
container-specific. The route of least resistance, I guess.

Also, looking at the massive energy it cost to deal with our failure 
back then, is making many of us wary (me at least) from dealing with 
this stuff now, when we have lots of other things to work on as well.

My opinion is that the changes to fortress to incorporate the meta-stuff 
features should be rolled back or done on a post-1.0 branch, the 
discussion postponed, releases finished, and general quality of existing 
stuff improved (we really need unit tests!) before tackling this. That 
said, I won't be in the way. I'm just gonna take on a passive role here 
while you guys battle the meta once more. I don't feel like doing this 
right now :D

- LSD