[csw-maintainers] [POLICY] Shared library placement proposal

[Peter FELECAN]

Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com> writes:

> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 6:55 PM, Ben Walton <bwalton at opencsw.org> wrote:
>> E
>>> Please take the appropriate section, write it in normal-people
>>> language as much as possible, and put it on our own pages.
>>
>> Why the insistence on dumbed-down language?  These documents are aimed
>> at maintainers, not the general public.
>
> By saying, that you are saying, "maintainers are 'special': they're
> smarter than 'the general public'. The general public is too stupid to
> understand our elite documents, we shouldnt bother trying to write
> docs for more 'common' people"

This is what *you* say. Nobody have said something like that. However,
you are wrong on the public/audience, i.e., who's the readership/users
of our policies. It is the maintainer community.

> Excuse me?
> We should be moving away from elitism, not towards it. We need to be
> more inclusive.

Not being elitist haven't drawn crowds to our project.

> Putting things in RFC-style language is a major turn-off to potential
> maintainers who arent already familiar with that sort of jargon.

In my opinion, and this is said now, somebody who's not familiar or is
not willing to become familiar with the standards of our field should
better abstain. If you analyze the causes of "turn-off" is more about
past arrogant attitudes, arbitrariness, opacity, &c, than elitism. By the
way, what's wrong with elitism when it designates high professional
standards?

-- 
Peter