On 5 January 2015 at 11:13, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Sun, Jan 04, 2015 at 11:01:08PM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
For those curious as to "Why not the wiki?", a Sphinx project hosted on a pull request capable service like GitHub, BitBucket or Kallithea offers a much nicer workflow for reviewing of proposed changes, together with an integrated issue tracker for submitting proposals for updates (https://github.com/pypa/python-packaging-user-guide/ is the project behind packaging.python.org, for example).
The concept of "proposed changes" goes completely against the grain of community-managed content. Imagine if Wikipedia required you to make pull requests.
Wikipedia's typical equivalent of pull requests is when editors revert a page to an earlier version and move the discussion of the proposed change to an earlier version. This approach can be escalated to *actual* pull requests when the editors lock a page to disrupt an ongoing edit war. The "anyone can publish by default" approach has the advantage of significantly increasing editing throughput by streamlining the handling of non-controversial cases. The downside as a reader is that it achieves this by allowing a brief window where controversial changes can be published without first establishing consensus, which means you may be presented with inaccurate information on controversial topics depending on when you check a page. I think that model works well for the task of creating a collaborative encyclopaedia (where "eventually accurate" is good enough for almost all purposes, and lowering barriers to entry for casual contribution of corrections is a high priority), but I don't believe it's appropriate for the task of delegating the CPython core development team's reputation and authority to other groups. For that, a pre-commit review process, or a more explicit topic area delegation (like the Python Packaging Authority handling packaging.python.org), makes more sense to me: if we trust folks to maintain a module or topic area *in* the standard library, we should be able to trust them to provide reasonable and balanced recommendations regarding applications and libraries that are maintained *outside* the standard library. Regards, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia