[python-committers] Timeline to vote for a governance PEP

[Paul Moore]

I'm going to quote multiple people here and respond to various
comments at once. It's way harder doing so than it would have been in
Discourse, so I'm sort of proving that for myself (but having said
that, I was already aware of, and fine with, the idea that Discourse
does stuff like this better - it's simply that I don't have the time
right now to learn a new bit of software and adapt my workflow to its
approach).

On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 at 19:34, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> I don’t think there is anything stopping people from doing that right now (and honestly, right now seems like the *right* time to do that if it’s going to happen, so that the proposals can evolve based on any discussion that comes out of that). Waiting until the proposals are set in stone seems like a less useful implementation of that idea.

Well, in my case I specifically don't want to end up commenting on
things that have changed and my understanding is out of date. That's a
common problem with PEP discussions, and one that I don't feel would
be helpful here. But agreed, if you see it as "wait until things are
set in stone", it sounds worse. Seeing it as "waiting until things are
stable" sounds more reasonable (at least to me) while still meaning
essentially the same ;-)

> I suspect the reason that people aren’t doing that, is just nobody has started that discussion for one reason or another.

I suspect that what those reasons are would be interesting. I wonder
how high "because I didn't think the proposal was finished yet" would
come? It's what's stopping me (although I tend to comment on threads
started by others more than starting my own, so I'm not a good
example),

On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 at 19:37, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> Hopefully the above explanation assuages your worries, otherwise I don't understand your worries.

To an extent, yes. My main worry is that there won't *be* the sort of
discussion I'm hoping for. I like to have a sense of what the broad
consensus is on a proposal before making my own final decision, and at
the moment there's no discussion that I've seen that gives me that
sort of sense. If that remains the case over the 2 week voting period,
it'll be a little late by that point. And it's not obvious to me how I
could *start* such a discussion - "so how are people going to vote?"
isn't a particularly subtle opening. This tends to be "solved" (in
some sense) in political debates by the various parties trying to
persuade people to vote for them. That's not happening here, and I
think I'm just finding that unnerving (because the whole process has a
feel of a political debate to me).

Anyhow, I guess it's just me expecting something from the process that
it's not. And that's for me to deal with.

On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 at 19:49, Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:
> In the absence of trying it for yourself, you could, e.g., look for
> what the people who designed the system had in mind.  The lack of a
> fully threaded view in Discourse was 100% intentional, not due to,
> e.g., laziness, or lack of time or skill.
>
> Here's a start:
>
>     https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/
>
> I'm not necessarily endorsing those views, but I did take the time to
> try to find out _why_ they did what they did.  It wasn't capricious.
> There are things I do and don't like about Discourse, but _which_
> things are still changing for me over time ;-)

Thanks, Tim. That link is definitely something I'll read up on. My
impression has always been that every part of Discourse's design was
carefully thought through, but I hadn't seen any specifics before. As
I say above, though, it's not that I don't intend to try Discourse
(and indeed, I know there are many things I expect to like about it) -
it's simply that I don't have time right now. I'm twitchy about that
fact because I *want* to follow the discussions on the governance
issues, but I haven't worked out an effective way to do so with the
time I have available right now.

(No need for replies to any of the above. I appreciate all of the
comments and anything I'm still concerned about is something I'll have
to work out for myself).

Paul