General strategy

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

Before I start voting and commenting on specific issues, I'd like to
raise a point about our general strategy.

On important issues, where there is real disagreement within the cleanup
committee or where the issue is so critical that all sides must be
carefully explained, it is important that we present the issue with
multiple proposals and that the choosing is done by X3J13 as a whole.

On the other hand, a lot of these issues are trivial little things that
need to be cleaned up one way or another.  I believe that X3J13 and the
Common Lisp community as a whole want these to be resolved without a lot
of needless agonizing, and they want this committee to provide the
leadership to get that job done.  If there are two or three solutions to
some issue that differ only in "aesthetics", we on the cleanup committee
should converge on one solution, propose it, and endorse it.

We shouldn't say, "Well, we could do A and then again we could B, but
someone suggeted C and that's OK too."  Instead, we should say, "We
propose A."  In the discussion section we should say, "Solutions B and C
were discussed, but the cleanup committee has settled on A as the best
solution."  If we send multiple-choice proposals to X3J13 on trivial
issues where it doesn't matter, the discussion will focus on those
stupid things and much more important issues will be neglected.

A number of the proposals currently offer useless options of this kind,
either as actual choices to be voted on or as variations suggested in
the discussion section.  We should try to resolve these among ourselves
rather than leaving them hanging.  I'm not worried about people
following us blindly -- X3J13 seems to have enough sharp and contentious
people on it to prevent any abuse of this power.

-- Scott