Rules clarification

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

This is your moderator again:

[ Messages from me in the role of moderator will carry some version of
the above label.  Otherwise, just assume that it is Scott Fahlman, one
of the many random participants in various design debates.  I will try
to keep these roles separate, though it won't always be easy. ]

This mailing list is not ONLY for proposals and formal debate.  We also
need a technical communication channel for use by the Common Lisp
community, and at present we have only the one mailing list.  We may
need to fix that -- let's see how this goes.

Queries about what is currently legal, in the opinion of the rest of us,
are allowed.  So are queries about how people have implemented various
things.  If these queries result in debates or proposed clarifications,
then at some point we must invoke the formal mechanism that regulates
such things, or we'll be swamped all over again.

In the case of Safier's message, it was already a proposal, not a query,
and was on an issue likely to result in some debate.  That's why he
should not have introduced it directly onto the list in the middle of
other discussions, instead of going through the moderator.