[m-dev.] for review: developer introduction for webpage

[Zoltan Somogyi]

On 16-Jan-2001, Tyson Dowd <trd at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> I'm happy to mention that it is dangerous, but I'm not sure about
> deleting it.  If I delete the section people still aren't going to 
> know about the interdependencies, and they also won't know about this
> potentially useful thing.
> 
> (if you don't agree, see last paragraph)

My point is that the technique you describe is *not* useful for people
who don't know the dependencies.

> I was thinking that this document is intended for a wider audience of
> people who might not be interested in submitting to the project.
> With that audience I didn't want the document to sound like a lot of
> "thou must" statements -- I was going to let them make up their own
> minds about their software development practices.

You are right, we shouldn't talk about about "must", but "may" is too weak.
If someone extends Mercury and writes a paper about the extension, I would
strongly prefer that the extension pass bootcheck and the test case (because
otherwise the paper is suspect) even if they don't check the extension back in.

We should therefore use "should".

Zoltan.
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