Re: [commit] Mention VAX floating-point support in NEWS

[Jim Blandy <jimb at redhat dot com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> I fail to see how asking for approval of a 2-liner, and a day or two
> of delay waiting for responses, could possibly affect productivity.
> For that matter, I don't see how changes in NEWS can affect
> development in the first place.

It's three E-mails instead of one.  It's another pending change to
keep track of until the approval comes through.

But this wasn't really your point: if I'm reading your messages right,
you felt that 1) Joel was arguing that it was okay for Mark to
sidestep established practices because it would be more productive if
those practices where changed; and that 2) policies should be changed
through discussion and agreement, not just by following the policies
you wish you had.

I'll buy the second thesis, but I doubt the first.  Rather than seeing
Joel's mail as a post-facto justification for Mark's commit, why not
read it as a suggestion that we discuss and change the policy?
Looking at the archives, I think it reads just as well both ways.

<returning from the meta-meta-discussion to the meta-discussion>

I agree that NEWS is user-level documentation, and should be held to a
higher standard of general comprehensibility than, say, ChangeLog
entries.  I think there's a lot to be said for having a single person
in charge of editing the entries and keeping them grouped in some
logical fashion; when everyone just tacks stuff on at the front, it
gets kind of incoherent.  Given that Eli has been consistently
responsive to doc changes for years, I don't think this will be much
of a bottleneck.

<returning from the meta-discussion to the discussion>

Mark's change seems user-presentable and reasonably placed to me.