Re: Rules: A Modest Proposal

On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 3:34 PM, David Fetter <david@fetter.org> wrote:
>> What would be the benefit of this radical proposal?
>
> The radical proposal was the RULE system.  It's been tested now, and
> it's pretty much failed.

You still haven't explained what actual benefit we'd get out of doing this.

I agree that rules, except for SELECT rules, don't seem to be very
useful.  Perhaps others have found them so, but I have found triggers
to be a better fit for everything that I ever want to do.  Every time
I think, hmm, maybe I could use a rule for that, I reread the chapter
and change my mind.

However, there is a very real possibility that there are people out
there who have applications that are based on the way rules work
today.  If we were to remove support for rules, they would not be able
to upgrade past 8.4.  That seems to me to be the sort of thing that we
wouldn't want to do unless we had a good reason - and the closest
you've come to saying what you think that reason might be is "they're
mostly a foot-gun", which I don't find very compelling.

I think we want to be moving in the direction of making upgrading
easier, not more difficult, and that means maintaining backward
compatibility even for features that are of marginal utility, unless
they're getting in the way of something else.

...Robert