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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
david_chisnall@infosec.exchange ("David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)") wrote:
One of the weird things in our industry is how many people who participate in standards bodies have never had to maintain something with compatibility guarantees for a long time. If you go to one of the ISO groups that deals with plumbing standards, for example, everyone involved has had to deal with decades-old pipe work and has a visceral understanding of the consequences of standardising the wrong thing and having to change things during the lifespan of a building. But in every standards discussion I’ve been in, someone has proposed things that will obviously cause problems within ten to twenty years and half the group has nodded along and said ‘yup, that will definitely solve a problem I have now’. And saying ‘later we are going to want to do this other thing, and if people have built things with the assumption that putting this in the standard will create then we will have a massive migration headache’ has people complaining that I’m slowing down the process.
And that’s not to single out any standards group or process. I have had this experience in every standards process I was involved in (though, in the ones 20+ years ago, I was generally on the other side of the disagreement).