cElementTree clear semantics

[Neil Hodgson]

Paul Boddie:

> Regardless of anyone's alleged connection with Boo or newsgroup
> participation level, the advice to contact the package
> author/maintainer is sound. It happens every now and again that people
> post questions to comp.lang.python about fairly specific issues or
> packages that would be best sent to mailing lists or other resources
> devoted to such topics. It's far better to get a high quality opinion
> from a small group of people than a lower quality opinion from a larger
> group or a delayed response from the maintainer because he/she doesn't
> happen to be spending time sifting through flame wars amidst large
> volumes of relatively uninteresting/irrelevant messages.

    As the author of a widely used component (Scintilla) I feel public 
fora should be preferred over private mail since
* The effort in answering is spread over more people.
* The author will only have experience in a narrow range of usage and 
the query is likely to match some other user's experience.
* The author may be out of touch or busy.
* The author will make mistakes which can be picked up by other 
participants. I'd estimate that 10% of the answers I give are wrong or 
useless, sometimes due to misunderstanding the query and sometimes due 
to confusion over how the component works.
* Public fora are archived and searchable.

    Neil