[aur-general] [off-topic][ansible-aur] call for comment on pull request 50

[Konstantin Gizdov]

On 2/1/21 12:50 PM, Roland Puntaier via aur-general wrote:
> On Mon 21Jan25 13:32, alad via aur-general wrote:
>> In this thread, 0 (as a neutral element for addition, or zero element
>> for multiplication) is conflated with the empty set (which has
>> *cardinality* zero).
>>
>> As such I would kindly ask people to stop using "mathematics" to make
>> their argument look legitimate.
>>
>> Alad
>>
>> PS. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/divide-by-zero/
> 
> What you say, sounds to me like:
> 
> A: he is smart.
> B: No, you conflate he with a person. "he" consists of "h.e" and smart
> of "s.m.a.r.t".
>    How can he be smart?
While it might indeed sound that way, it is almost certainly not meant
to. A person can be smart, but being smart does not make you a person.
Dolphins have been shown to be very smart and some researchers even say
that octopuses rival or even exceed the smarts of people in some areas.
However, in both these examples, none of the things being smart are people.

Same as the number of things of something can be zero, but that does not
make that something the same thing as zero itself, nor does it make the
concept of zero the same as the concept of number and/or size (cardinality).

In any case, this is besides the point. You were given an opportunity to
have this fixed with no effort on your part [1], but if I understand
correctly, you did not like the way it was going to be implemented, even
though it would have worked exactly as you wanted on the surface. I
think your objection had the opposite effect and had the maintainer
research a bit and change their mind on the whole idea.

I think one valid/possible resolution here is to agree to the proposed
changes to your PR, implement and submit them in a new PR, and see if it
gets accepted under the argument that "this module is expected/supposed
to be doing a lot of the checks for its users".

Bear in mind that this is solely the decision of the maintainers and
that change can have other repercussions down the line, which might not
be obvious at the moment. This is, in fact, an API change.

On the other hand, if you continue to insist that the private decision
of a TLA+ consultant [2] should be imposed universally on all maths and
by extension all software, I think you will face increasing amount of
push back and, I fear, you will not prevail.

Please don't take this email the wrong way. I hope I have provided you
with some context and at least one possible way to move forward on this
issue.

-- 
Regards,
Konstantin

[1] - https://github.com/kewlfft/ansible-aur/pull/50#issuecomment-763812453
[2] - https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/divide-by-zero/

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