Re: The request of words matter updated

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>]

> On 28/09/2022 17:34 Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> As Lawrence and Bart already noted, there's no good steer here from the
> various technical documents, or even vendors' manual pages.

Lawrence has some new input here, I'll keep that separate.

> Once that's established, perhaps someone could arrange for an online vote
> at one of the websites that do that?  Given no technical change results
> from any of this, opinion is all we've got, and there's evidently no
> sign of a consensus.

This appears to be where we're going.  I'll do some research on this, but
if anyone has pointers to a good place for an anonymous vote, let me know.

Thanks for the various cogent analyses of the points on both sides.
Beyond that, I don't think anyone has been called a Nazi yet, but there's
still time.

I think the ultimate reason this is contentious is it's something of a
curveball (googly in my terminology; nothing to do with Mountain View,
if anything still falls in that category) --- it brings in a whole
heap of things not usually expected on a technical list, so all of us
in turn bring in a whole heap of our own non-technical ideas.  At
least, that's about the only way to rationalise an involved discussion
on two words in a file that (as has been pointed out) most people will
never actually read.

Q&A
---

Q. Isn't it terrible people have such different ideas from me?
A. You might as well complain about night being different from day.
And actually I think it's good to have this discussion out in the 
open rather than just closed groups of true believers.

Q. But surely my position is so obviously right it has to win by default?
A. No, for the same reason.  There's no "obvious" at this level.  The
fact people come to such different conclusions means it requires
some consideration.  A vote looks to me the right way of doing this.

pws