Re: Debian Project Leader Elections 2007: Draft ballot
On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 12:04:06 +0200, Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net> said:
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 04:11:53PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> redundant information eases parsing of potentially MTA mangled
>> ballots
> It eases the parsing of occasional corner cases with some voters,
> yes, but if forces *all* voters to read something that is inherently
> confusing.
[ ] Choice 1: Foooo
[ ] Choice 2: Baar
Is inherently confusing? To whom? Are you personally
confused? or are you speculating?
Do we really want opinions from someone who is confused by
Choice N:? :)
>> Given that ballots can be word wrapped, can have common leading
>> text, might have words that are damaged by MUA's not encoding a
>> non-ascii word identically; it makes sense to increase the
>> robustness of the parser by giving it a well known, unique prefix.
> I don't see how any of that is more important than having a
> straightforward text for the voters to read. This is a user
> interface, it is not a machine interface; robustness towards the
> human eyes and minds is more important than robustness towards code
> parsers IMO.
I do not consider Choice 1/Choice 2 prefixes to be
non-straighforward, so the rest of your statements do not apply, as
far as my opinion is considered.
> Word wrapping and leading text is fairly inconsequent so they can be
> eliminated (disallowed) without much problem. Non-ASCII options are
> possible with e.g. people's names, but if we know for a fact that
> they aren't supported by the entire voting environment, they should
> be avoided. I should hope that people wouldn't be fussy about it
> given that we have already standardized on the English language
> anyway. (Raphael? :)
I would prefer not to mangle peoples names. I also would
prefer to not further refuse ballots that have been mangled by the
MUA before signing. In other words, I would personally not cater to
people who are confused by Choice N prefixes to options by adding
more code, making the parser fragile, and make for more bugs that the
secretary has to fix.
Color me unconvinced by the need, or the desirability, of the
proposed change.
मनोज श्रिवास्तव
--
Someday somebody has got to decide whether the typewriter is the
machine, or the person who operates it.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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