Code review, technical decision-making, and intent

I am not a RISC-V expert, but I certainly can understand and follow the arguments, and I am largely in disagreement with X512 here. (It is worth noting that this is entirely a technical discussion, and so if you do not understand the precise details of what is being discussed, it is pretty easy to choose sides for errant reasons.)

I think you are inadvertently committing a fallacy here. She is saying that it is not good to do it the way X512 has done it for (list of somewhat complex technical reasons). Someone who does not understand those reasons may think that she is thus arguing on the basis of some kind of authority, which is not at all what is going on here.

That is not really a great way to build community projects. Consensus is required to build things in community; if that happens naturally and without concerted effort, then that’s great! If it happens by deliberation and everyone still comes to an agreement, that’s good too. But ultimately, if it happens neither organically nor by debate, at the end of the day, it has to somehow be reached, and sometimes that just happens by majority consensus and whoever is left over will have to accept some kind of compromise.

Haiku has proceeded slowly and meticulously because we care about details, quality, and doing the right thing; not the quick thing or the easy thing. We have not hesitated in the past to go against the grain of what other OSes do if we think something else is better. This case is no different: that is, we are not going to just decide to do something simply because other OSes did it some way; but we are going to study why they did it, and if we agree with their reasoning, we will probably do the same, rather than doing something different for lesser reasons.

I will attempt to give, in my next post, a “layman’s explanation” of the argument in question.

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