Re: #64 Make Status Information Optional

[Frank Strauss <strauss@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

Hi!

David Harrington writes:

David> Problematic Requirement: #64
David>        Requirement name: Make Status Information Optional
David>        Description of the problem with the requirement: I believe this
David> is a bad idea if we allow inheritance and independent evolution of
David> modules. It is very possible that a base class could be declared
David> obsolete, but the derived classes would still incorrectly default to
David> current. Some might conclude that they cannot obsolete something that
David> somebody might have derived from, so they leave it marked as current.

David> I think defaulting to current will be very confusing to people and the
David> cure is worse than the illness. We need to make our standards
David> unambiguous, much more than we need to eliminate a little redundancy.

Added this and that:

    <p>
      Frank: Status information wrt inheritance is a general problem
      as already stated in the description section.  It does not
      matter whether the status clause is optional with a well defined
      default status if absent or whether the status clause is
      mandatory.  There is no problem of ambiguity.
    </p>

 -frank