I suspect that one consequence of allowing packages to ask usersquestions at install time, as Debian does ,is that it allows divisive packaging issues to stay unresolved becausepeople can always say 'fine, we'll offer both options and let the userchoose'. No one actually has to compromise or give in, so everyone sitsaround quietly nursing the issue until (if you are lucky) it all getsforgotten about.

(Of course, then you can have a new flamewar over what the defaultchoice should be

We're still in the process of designing our next generation offileserver architecture, so I've decided to write down what we want outof the design.

• good long term storage management ,as we are likely to keep the architecture for at least five years andprobably more.
• we'd like be able to do highly available storage that has no singlepoint of failure, because we have some filesystems that are crucialto our entire infrastructure.

• we should be able to add special purpose capacity without hugeexpense.

At least for personal code, I've decided that my standard for what Iconsider the clearest idiom for something is usually what first comesto mind when I try to write code to do the something. My idea here isthat if a particular approach is what came to mind first when I tried tosolve the problem, it is quite likely to be obvious to me what the codeis trying to do when I reread it in the future because clearly thisparticular approach is what is on the top of my mind