On Sunday, August 3, 2003, at 03:47  AM, Andreas Raab wrote:

> That said, your argument about package removal being intrinsically 
> tight to
> the amount of "smartness" one can put into a "library" greatly 
> disturbs me.
> That's for two reasons. For one thing, it ultimately comes down to the 
> point
> that if we always have to assume the lowest common denominator we'll be
> unable to introduce any higher-level abstraction (which, naturally, 
> imply
> some "smartness"). In a sense, your arguments can be interpreted as 
> that
> every application _should_ have to implement the smartness by itself.

Your right, doing down the road opened up by this argument could lead 
there, but it's a bit further than I'd go. I do think that introducing 
higher-level abstractions becomes more difficult when you have to 
consider the application/library distinction. I remain hopeful that we 
can design libraries with some level of commonality between 
applications in mind, hopefully not the lowest one.

> Secondly, even in the "package age" we can still get a reasonably good
> feeling about what most clients expectations are merely by loading the
> packages. So while you are right about "fixing" them being an 
> unreasonably
> complex problem, it is quite possible to look at them, understand 
> them, and
> choose sensible defaults for them. Given that today most 
> "applications" are
> plain broken when it comes to handling text (as almost all of them 
> simply
> convert line ends into garbage) it seems that it may be a better 
> default to
> have a general smart, auto-translating default.

Yes, here I mostly agree. My only worry is that trying to solve the 
problem at the library level will a) reduce incentive to fix all the 
broken applications and b) focus development of the libraries on 
"better smarts" rather than well-factored abstractions for smart 
applications.

Smart-by-default would definitely improve the current situation. But I 
don't think it's sufficient for the long term, and I fear it would the 
impede the development and adoption of a better solution.

> Of course, you are welcome to disagree, but now I'm out of this thread 
> for
> real ;-)

Yes, me too. I'll cheerfully go along with whatever the community 
decides.

Colin