On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 3:21 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

Georg Brandl writes:

...

The Python Wiki should also be considered:

* Comparing versions is easy, and versions are only saved on "Save"

* It supports reStructuredText, so there is no need for conversion afterwards.

And it's vendor-neutral :-)

Touche. I still don't like wikis for this purpose very much -- a person editing effectively grabs a lock on the whole file. (Wikimedia addresses this to some extend by allowing sections to be edited, but I don't see this feature in moinmoin yet, and I don't see us switching.) Also there is no access control -- anyone who can create a login can edit. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:02 AM, William Dode wrote:

On 20-02-2009, Guido van Rossum wrote:

...

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 3:21 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

...

Georg Brandl writes:

...

The Python Wiki should also be considered:

* Comparing versions is easy, and versions are only saved on "Save"

* It supports reStructuredText, so there is no need for conversion afterwards.

And it's vendor-neutral :-)

Touche.

I still don't like wikis for this purpose very much -- a person editing effectively grabs a lock on the whole file. (Wikimedia addresses this to some extend by allowing sections to be edited, but I don't see this feature in moinmoin yet, and I don't see us switching.) Also there is no access control -- anyone who can create a login can edit.

Isn't it the good oportunity to try a DVCS ?

That was my original suggestion, yes, but Stephen Turnbull suggested Google Docs instead. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

Summary: Google Docs is easy to use, featureful, and here now. Since AIUI the PEPs eventually need to be hosted at python.org, I see Google Docs as an immediate replacement for email transmission of early drafts of PEPs, not as a permanent solution to PEP storage. William Dode writes:

Isn't it the good oportunity to try a DVCS ?

I thought about that (and if I agreed I wouldn't have posted), but there are reasons why Guido is "looking forward to" rather than "calling for volunteers". ISTM that a DVCS is just a wiki where you can't find stuff unless you're told where it is. It will take time. What Google Docs provided for me was an infrastructure that accomplished several useful services automatically, and stayed out of my face (except for the lack of pruning of uninteresting revisions). IMO the features we want are (1) a permanent, easily computed URN for the draft document repo -- DVCS can do this, with straightforward support from python.org -- wiki can do this as a convention such as reserving PEP_0374 for final doc with PEP_0374_draft for development (2) editor control over access to individual documents -- AFAIK there's no mechanism for this at python.org, so to use a DVCS would require developing one -- no mechanism for this in most wikis AFAIK (but ZWiki can do it) -- it could be argued that the current convention of people staying out of each others' space would work, but what about non-committers (like me)? (3) automatic merging of concurrent work -- DVCS does this, but needs to be pushed afterward -- most wikis can't do this in the framework of a single document, but you could organize the doc by sections for drafting (4) automatic saves of intermediate work -- at the tweak stage, the effort to save, commit, and push to a DVCS outweighs the effort to tweak, costing a lot of polish IME -- wikis don't do this, and I wonder whether people would be willing to save unpolished work, or leave it sitting in the browser "until later" (5) a recorded out of band channel for the editors (when plural) to comment -- "XXX" can work but when it's scutwork (eg, researching URLs or reworking sections to have parallel organization) it's ugly and distracting for non-editors to read; DVCS by itself provides no such medium, one would need to be developed -- ditto wikis (although Wikipedia has its linked discussion channels, and this could be emulated on any wiki by a convention such as PEP_0374_talk, which would have the advantage that interested non-editors could look at the comments and contribute URLs and ideas, etc) -- for non-trivial work, mail/IRC doesn't really cut it; you're more likely to make the indicated tweak if you're working on the document anyway, mail/IRC is likely to be focused elsewhere and the cost of changing focus too high to do it *now* (1) and (2) are obvious, I think, and I don't know how much (3) really matters when the editors are a small group. But I was surprised by how much (4), and (5) contributed to my experience working on PEP 0374. Maybe Brett, Barry, or Alexandre would like to comment? I note that the FSF had a rather complex system for its collaborative development of 3d generation licenses. I don't think that's necessary for most PEPs.

Not that I'm expecting to be working on PEPs any time soon, but just as a different perspective, I would find the effort to open up Google docs to be a much higher barrier to doing some editing tweaks than the dvcs case. For the DVCS, I'd just write a little script that would (1) update (2) open the editor on the file (3) do the commit/push dance when the file was closed. So for me it would be as easy as editing the file locally.

So for my work style, a DVCS would be the biggest win.

--RDM

That's funny because I would expect that for most people it's the exact opposite... just create a gmail account... boom, done... I'm not necessarily advocating that but just saying that IMO, most people will find google docs to be the "fastest" and "easiest" solution. -- Haikus are easy Most make very little sense Refrigerator

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 6:25 AM, wrote:

On Sat, 21 Feb 2009 at 01:12, Jeff Hall wrote:

...

...

Not that I'm expecting to be working on PEPs any time soon, but just as a different perspective, I would find the effort to open up Google docs to be a much higher barrier to doing some editing tweaks than the dvcs case. For the DVCS, I'd just write a little script that would (1) update (2) open the editor on the file (3) do the commit/push dance when the file was closed. So for me it would be as easy as editing the file locally.

So for my work style, a DVCS would be the biggest win.

--RDM

That's funny because I would expect that for most people it's the exact opposite... just create a gmail account... boom, done... I'm not necessarily advocating that but just saying that IMO, most people will find google docs to be the "fastest" and "easiest" solution.

The ease of creating a gmail account has nothing to do with the point to which I was responding (context which is lost from your reply). That's setup. I was responding to a point talking about in-the-moment workflow. A browser and a GUI javascript program are slower than a unix command line based editor such as vim or emacs both to open up and to use. Thus for me, by using a script to automate the part that the OP suggested would slow the dvcs user down (the update/commit/push cycle), I make the dvcs in-the-moment workflow much faster _for me_ than Google Docs.

As I said it's a matter of personal style. Some people _will_ find Google Docs easier and more productive than a dvcs. My point was that not all people will.

That's a discussion that can never come to a decent conclusion. We will never find a solution that works for *everyone*, and IMO we don't need to bend over backwards to try. I don't doubt for a second that for *most* people the barrier to using Google Docs is less than the barrier to using a DVCS, even if when you take a sampling of hard core open source developers that might not be so clear-cut. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009, rdmurray@bitdance.com wrote:

Not that I'm expecting to be working on PEPs any time soon, but just as a different perspective, I would find the effort to open up Google docs to be a much higher barrier to doing some editing tweaks than the dvcs case.

For me, the big barrier to Google docs is the requirement to fire up a GUI browser and log into Google. -- Aahz (aahz@pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Feb 20, 2009, at 10:56 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

(1) and (2) are obvious, I think, and I don't know how much (3) really matters when the editors are a small group. But I was surprised by how much (4), and (5) contributed to my experience working on PEP 0374. Maybe Brett, Barry, or Alexandre would like to comment?

My only comment is that Google docs did not always work correctly for me. E.g. at some point toward the end of the process, I lost the ability to add comments. But hey, it's a big pile of JavaScript so I can understand it'll be buggy. :) When it did work, it was pretty convenient. I don't think too many PEPs will need that kind of high bandwidth collaborative environment, but it's nice to have when you need it. Barry -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) iQCVAwUBSaBl9nEjvBPtnXfVAQK3hwP/dGqkRvIOZbQLVq3m2e+x632jACisNa8D s398OU/dLz5ZLI6jMGzBTV4r30RypdlQzI47SzfVb2NS6eEtDEkej1f2TvJUm/uJ O3ROBgo87rmcd9Yu9tClWJLTLw195N1F0fUoy4GwO8cR0+pWXhiVocaRMFSaMciT zbWrVfp1ep0= =l2FD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----