Sipping from the Waterfall

I had a conversation with someone from another group today. I guess he's a contractor or something with a very small and specific task he's trying to perform. He probably has a hard job or something, but this was ridiculous. The following is a description of what went on in my abbreviated and paraphrased quoting style:

Guy in my group: Hey, we want the rsync URL to look something like this: xxxxx.

Me: Oh, minor correction, the URL is actually formed like this....

Guy in other group: But hey, we like to build a giant commandline like this where we pull stuff together from lots of different places and assemble them on the fly..

Me: Um, I think it'd be easier on both sides if we just use a single rsync URL.

GIOG: But it's really easy for us to take it in three different parameters and assemble them on the fly.

[GIOG proceeded to show me an example of his three config entries.]

[I pointed out what his example looked like as a single parameter (rsync URL), then gave him a few other variations that he couldn't do with his three parameters that I can do with my one.]

GIOG: Great! Can you write up a spec?

That last one was a direct quote pasted out of my email.

Do people really work like this?

What would that even look like? I'm picturing three to five pages of obligatory specification template surrounding the following sentence:

I will provide a parameter called rsync_url with the URL of the rsync location from which you can get your stuff.