Re: RFCs: two proposals for change

On Fri, Aug 04, 2000 at 09:44:32AM -0600, Nathan Torkington wrote:
> I think the main issue then is "how do we tell people that discussion
> of this RFC should end, for better or worse"?  This boils down to an
> open or closed distinction.

I think a more interesting issue is this:

RFCs are only going to be written by activists; smaller working groups are
only going to be populated by activists. There may be a vocal minority of
people who want, say, multiline comments. So the people who go off and form
perl6-language-mlc and come back with a considered opinion are those who
actually care about multiline comments because they want them in Perl 6.
There may be some brave soul who passionately despises multiline comments
enough to write an anti-RFC, but I'd bet that the vast silent majority 
passionately don't care enough about the feature to do anything, but similarly
don't care enough to vehemently speak out against it. So there's a danger that
we'll be overrun with featurism simply because some features are wanted by
a minority even though the most of us don't give a damn about them.

The question is, then, how do we sufficiently register apathy?

-- 
A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used.
		-- D. Gries