[python-committers] A different way to focus discussions

[Antoine Pitrou]

Hi,

Note that some PEPs are, still, mostly uncontroversial (PEP 574 is an
example).

I agree with Nathaniel : PEP 572 is the poster child for lengthy, heated
discussions.  I'm still surprised you thought it was a good idea to
discuss this.  Perhaps it we tried to discourage syntax change and/or
builtin change PEPs a little more we'd have less heated PEPs :-)

It would be *very* interesting if someone was willing to do some stats
on PEPs over time: e.g. number of PEPs discussed every year, discussion
length, number of discusssion participants.  I actually expect overall
PEP activity to have gone down since the 2000s.


Le 19/05/2018 à 01:41, Guido van Rossum a écrit :
> I want to completely avoid discussion on python-dev. This probably means
> we should never post the full text of the PEP there. (We may have to
> amend PEP 1 to support this.)

Are you saying PEPs wouldn't even be *validated* by python-dev?
If so, it's not a mere change to focus discussions, it's also a change
in governance.

And while we may decide to change this piece of the governance model,
the replacement process should IMO be something a little less vague than
« discussion happens on Github with whoever happens to be interested or
available ».  Sorry if this is misrepresenting your position.

Regards

Antoine.



> There are probably some other parts needed too, e.g. guidelines as to
> when a PEP is considered ripe for copying to the peps repo (and
> scripts/bots to make repeated copies easy -- e.g. there could be a bot
> that copies a PEP from that PEP's own repo to the peps repo each time a
> commit is made to the master branch in its own repo). There could also
> be guidelines to ensure a PEP is in a fairly non-controversial state
> (probably using the IETF's motto "rough consensus and working code")
> before being considered for approval. There's definitely some time when
> a PEP has an assigned number but is still controversial -- during that
> state debate on python-dev should be strictly redirected to the PEP's
> own repo.
> 
> For some PEPs it may make sense to assign a senior reviewer who decides
> what's considered non-controversial.
> 
> We can borrow more from the IETF process for RFCs:
> https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/
> 
> --Guido
> 
> PS. Carol: Jupyter's process looks great! I just don't have the guts to
> propose any serious changes to the physical logistics of publishing
> PEPs, since changes to the structure of the peps repo are so hard. We
> still haven't converted all PEPs to .rst format, despite efforts by
> Mariatta and others, and attempts to move all PEPs to a subdirectory
> have also failed, due to perpetual lack of resources to complete the
> task (and e.g. the need to update scripts on python.org
> <http://python.org> whenever the peps repo structure changes).