If one doesn't know who the senior developers are yet, she should
think twice about whether she's ready to PEP anything. That's
not a litmus test; some PEPs have eventually succeeded though the
proponent was new to the project development process.[2] But it's
a lot less painful if you can tell who's likely to be able to
sway the whole project one way or the other.
I think that entire paragraph made it sound even worse than what I
wrote originally. It reads to an outsider as “if you don’t know
what’s wrong I’m not going to tell you”.
"What's wrong" *with what*? Nothing in that paragraph implies thatanything is wrong with anything.
Sorry. I was vague. Let me try to explain what I meant. It’s a common trope that people who are bad at relationships expect their partners to be mind readers. This is exemplified by the expression I quoted: “if you don’t know what’s wrong, I’m not going to tell you”. This is funny/sad because it is precisely when someone doesn’t know something that it is important to tell them instead of clamming up and refuse further information.
Me and others have pointed out that we can’t figure out and the docs don’t say how the change process happens. The response to this was
If one doesn't know who the senior developers are yet, she should
think twice about whether she's ready to PEP anything
I can’t see how this is different from the trope. Is there a committee? Then why not just name it?
How does one figure this out? Should I just do some statistics on the git repo and surmise that the top committers are the committee? Do I have to read the commit log and all mails in this mailing list and Python-dev the last 10 years? Do I need a time machine so I can attend sprints and pycons and core developer meetings that have already happened? Is there a secret handshake?
I am being a bit silly with these suggestions but it’s to point out that I see no way to exclude any of those possibilities from PEP1 or your mails. In fact they seem to me less like silly examples now than before your mails.
Is this me specifically or “you” in the abstract? English isn’t
great here.
Nothing in that post is about you, it's just that your post triggeredmine, and a quote from your post was a convenient lead-in to adiscussion of several aspects of the PEP process (and more generallythe decision to implement a feature or not) that are pretty opaque tomost newcomers.
Good. Thanks for the clarification.
/ Anders