Issue: DEFPACKAGE (Version 7)

[barmar@Think.COM]

    Possibly your concern is that you are implicitly worring about the
    consequences of one particular merging algorithm, without specifically
    saying which one you are thinking about?

I'm not worried about any particular algorithm.  I just don't like the
ambiguous wording of the original spec.  How about this as an
alternative to "at most the original package will be updated":
"however, no objects other than the original package will be
modified as a result."

    Re: "benign"

    Well, this cannot be left up to the imagination.  The naive meaning here 
    must not imply that you are safe from catastrophic errors.  If what is 
    meant is "maintain memory integrity" or "cause no hardware or operating 
    system exceptions", then this would have to be spelled out clearly.

I'm not leaving anything up to the imagination.  Kathy's proposal for
the new classification system of error situations includes a
description of this case.  As I said, I don't remember the actual
terminology she used for this case (I suggested "undefined but
benign", but she rejected it), but the description was like what you
described.