[Python-ideas] A bit meta

[Nick Coghlan]

On 29 January 2016 at 18:03, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 09:55:42PM -0600, Michael Selik wrote:
>> One defect of a mailing list is the difficulty of viewing a weighted
>> average of opinions. The benefit is that anyone can voice an opinion.
>> This is more like the Senate than the House -- Rhode Island appears
>> (on paper) to have as much influence as California. Luckily, we have a
>> form of President. I'm guessing a House occurs in a more private mode
>> of communication?
>
> The Python community is not a democracy. Voting +1, -1 etc. should not
> be interpreted as *actual* votes that need to counted and averaged, but
> as personal opinions intended to give other members of the community an
> idea of whether or not you would like to see a proposed feature.

Right, in terms of the language and standard library design, some of
the essential points to note are:

- individual core committers have the authority to make changes
(although we vary in how comfortable we are exercising that authority)
- one of the things we're responsible for is judging what topics can
be handled with just a tracker discussion, what would benefit from a
mailing list thread, and what would benefit from going through the
full PEP process (this is still an art rather than a science, which is
why it isn't documented very well)
- https://docs.python.org/devguide/experts.html#experts records the
areas we individually feel comfortable exerting authority over
- the PEP process itself is defined in https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0001/
- one relatively common cause of escalation from tracker issues to
mailing list discussions is when consensus can't be reached in a
smaller forum, so perspectives are sought from a slightly wider
audience to see if that tips the balance one way or another
- when consensus still can't be reached (and nobody wants to escalate
to the full PEP process in order to request an authoritative
decision), then the status quo wins stalemates

The python-dev and python-ideas communities form a very important part
of that process, but the most valuable things folks bring are
additional perspectives (whether that's in the form of different use
cases, additional domains of expertise, knowledge of practices in
other programming language communities, etc)

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia