Subject: "Major changes" at this time

From: Tony Skjellum <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 94 18:37:15 CST

Marc, I think it is too late to make such big changes, there is not
even a detailed proposal (though that you could surely change by
Wednesday!). As you have taught me over the past year, by now we should
only consider air-tight recommendations with air-tight proposals,
whereas during the readings we started to require carefully thought out
and worked out proposals.  I am concerned that we will overlook
something major.

In analogy, within the context chapter, we will be restricting
changes to fixing the intercommunication section (except for minor
details elsewhere), and looking hard at some of the proposals (some of
the ideas worked out in France [eg, ideas discussed between you
and Lyndon on Intercommunication] have serious problems).  We are sticking
with well-formed proposals, and trying to augment incomplete proposals
(or defeat them in advance by finding serious problems).

I also think that we should not try to bring back ideas that were 
defeated (perhaps multiple times, or in the subcommittee process) at
this time.  Otherwise, we stand a good chance of not finishing.

In short, I think we are just doing incremental fixes at this meeting.
Can't we leave other things for MPI follow-on?

-Tony

PS Your idea does sound reasonable, but I think that the four modes need
   to be clarified better, so that the design appears more "orthogonal"
   to users.  Can you clarify what the total send/receive functionality
   would look like, etc.

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