On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 7:17 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull
On Python-Ideas, Guido van Rossum writes:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 2:12 AM, Greg Ewing wrote:
Fifth draft of the PEP. Re-worded a few things slightly to hopefully make the proposal a bit clearer up front.
Wow, how I long for the days when we routinely put things like this under revision control so its easy to compare versions.
FWIW, Google Docs is almost there. Working with Brett et al on early drafts of PEP 0374 was easy and pleasant, and Google Docs gives control of access to the document to the editor, not the Subversion admin. The ability to make comments that are not visible to non-editors was nice. Now that it's in Subversion it's much less convenient for me (a non-committer). I actually have to *decide* to work on it, rather than simply raising a browser window, hitting "refresh" and fixing a typo or two (then back to "day job" work).
The main problem with Google Docs is that is records a revision automatically every so often (good) but doesn't prune the automatic commits (possibly hard to do efficiently) OR mark user saves specially (easy to do). This lack of marking "important" revisions makes the diff functionality kind of tedious.
I don't know how automatic the conversion to reST was, but the PEP in Subversion is a quite accurate conversion of the Google Doc version.
Overall, I recommend use of Google Docs for "Python-Ideas" level of PEP drafts.
Rietveld would also be a good option: it offers more at-will revision control (rather than "whenever Google Docs decides"), allows you to attach comments to the revisions, and will give you nice diffs between PEP iterations. Collin