[developers] Re: pending/674: generator broken on everything except the ERG?

[Ann Copestake]

a follow-up to my rather too short comment about packing - packing really must 
be off by default because (as I understand it) it makes assumptions about the 
grammars that are not required by the formalism.   I don't know whether 
grammars that don't conform to these requirements simply don't pack, or 
whether packing could go wrong, but in any case, it would seem the wrong way 
round for it to be on by default.  i.e., if you've got a grammar which packs, 
it's because you've done something special, so therefore you should be 
responsible for switching packing on.  If there's a family of grammars that 
want packing, such as the Matrix grammars, this can presumably be done in 
their globals or user-fns file?

So, perhaps if you set it so it's off by default, you could also put some 
comment in so that it doesn't get casually switched back on?

Of course, generation requires an MRS-like semantic encoding, but since we had 
MRSs before we had grammars that packed well, these are somewhat independent.

Thanks,

Ann