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I think you are making some interesting points here.
The raw information exists to compile (at least a partial) list as you suggest: the archives of this mailing list. To date, however, no one has had the time and/or interest to try to boil the mass of ideas, conjectures, interesting results (and other stuff) down to a manageable document which a person could read in a reasonable amount of time. Barring that, perhaps a more realistic approach would be to try to assemble in one place a short list of things which are known about the VMS with some confidence: information of the type in Jacques' recent posting about line and paragraph relationships, or the A-hand/B-hand distinction are the sort of thing I am talking about. Another approach might be to solicit from the mailing list suggestions,
not for answers, but for questions - that is, for ideas for objective tests
which could be applied to the VMS to better characterize it. To give a
couple examples of the kind of thing I am thinking of:
and so on. One other observation: it may not be possible to apply the rigor of an IT project to the VMS simply because it is a hobby rather than anyone's job. Bruce Grant Larry Roux wrote: Thanks, Rene! I guess what I was trying to stress is that there does not seem to be a coherent attack at the VMS. A lot of ideas are floated, and die in the ether. Coming from the computing world I am used to people submitting ideas, and the rest of the group proposing alternative solutions, suggestions, or debunking the thought. Then a team of people work on making the best path to the outcome. Issue logs are kept. Best practices. What I would really like to see is a complete list of attacks being used and the chain of thoughts that propel the attack forward - or scuttle it. It seems we are a bunch of single units trying to attack the VMS one at a time, in seclusion. Many people are redoing old work (which is sometimes very valuable) and other people are working on attacks that might contain the one clue that the other person needs to resolve a problem. Personally, I find people sending suggestions/caveats very helpful ("Did you think of how your solution might fail in case b?" - "Your attack is interesting, but flawed in that ...."). There are a lot of great minds on this list. It seems such a shame that they are all being used as individual units rather than some powerful network. |