[meta-sig] Re: [Python-Dev] SIG: python-lang

[Andy Robinson]

Michael McLay says:
> This sounds a bit like the RFC mechanism used by the IETF.  The email
> lists are used for discussions, but the specifications and rationales
> are captured as numbered documents.  Perhaps python.org should have a
> (in)formal submission process modeled after the IETF process.
>
> The wiki idea sounds interesting as well, but I like the persistence
> of the IETF RFC documents.  My only complaints with the IETF RFCs is
> the lack of forward references in obsoleted RFC, but other than that I
> find it very easy to track the important decisions made by the IETF.
> I suppose the Python RFCs could use an XML document format to add some
> structure to the Python RFCs.

I like this suggestion.  I've worked on big multi-year corporate projects
with good architecture documents, and it was very important to be able to
see why things were done originally, even though circumstances change and
decisions often seem wrong several years later.

Much though I hate writing them, I also think thrashing out these proposals
and "signing them off" is a good exercise that ultimately saves time on
implementation.

Marc-Andre Lemburg's Unicode proposal is a good starting point.  Maybe this
could be made PyRFC001 on www.python.org somewhere.

- Andy Robinson