On Wed, 15 May 2019 at 21:34, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal via Python-Dev <python-dev@python.org> wrote:
Frankly, multiple long meandering threads in s single mailing list are not s very good archive either.
They aren't, I agree. But in my view, they constitute the *source material* that the summaries in the PEP should be based on. No-one should need to read the archives if they just want to know the points being made. But for someone who wonders how a particular conclusion was reached, having a single archive of record (to use Stephen's phrase) makes sense - certainly people *can* search multiple sources, but we should be trying to be transparent, and not making it too hard to research the background of a decision is part of that.
Ideally, the PEP is updated with a summary of the issues discussed as the discussion unfolds.
I'm not sure that's just "ideally" - one of the key purposes of a PEP should be to summarise the discussions.
(And links to the main discussion threads?)
That's nice to have, yes.
It founds like that didn’t happen in this case, but it’s not necessarily too late.
Definitely. In fact, I doubt there's much of any real interest that needs to be referenced (workflow debates are not the most interesting reading, in my experience :-))
As the community seems to be moving to a wider variety of fora, this will become all the more critical.
I completely agree here.
On May 15, 2019, at 1:09 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
Please, let's not start by privileging any particular type of channel in this discussion. I know what I like, but it's far more important to have a single place to refer to past discussion IMO. It's bad enough with python-ideas and python-dev.
100% agree. This shouldn't be about whether any particular channel is "better" or "worse" than any other. It's just about not having the original content of the discussions that feed into an accepted PEP be scattered too widely.
The stricture for the Council deliberation channel is different, since I expect the archives would be private to Council members: if you came into this discussion in the middle, what conversations would you want to be able to review?
In theory, PEP 13 says that the council should look for consensus rather than making decisions on their own. Ideally, the council's private deliberations should be of little interest to anyone else, because either (a) the consensus should be clearly visible from the public record of the debate, or (b) the public record should show that the discussion was getting nowhere, and the council had to make the final decision (at which point, the community has effectively given up the right to argue about why the council chose what they did). The reason the decision on PEP 581 started me thinking about this was precisely because I hadn't seen any signs of that consensus or of a stalled discussion. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right places, but I *thought* I was following the majority of PEP-related discussions (at least skimming them). So I was somewhat startled to see a formal decision come with what felt like no real warning. Paul