My pre-1.0 wishlist

[Eric S. Raymond]

Daniel Franke <dfoxfranke at gmail.com>:
> So weaken your notion of replicability from bit-for-bit-consistent
> results, to statistical behavior of a linear time-invariant system.

Daniel, in the abstract that is a brilliant idea and I'm impressed with
your ability to think out of the box. Concretely, alas, it's kind of nuts.

I will be delighted if you keep having boundary-busting ideas like
that, because some of them will work.  But I have to be the guy to
tell you that, in our context, trading a very hard but in principle
deterministically solvable problem of software forenics and testing
for a research-grade problem in applied statistics is *not progress!*.
That would be buying more trouble to escape less.

Even if we developed a procedure for computing a confidence figure that we
belived, *how would we sell it to our customers*?
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>