[python-committers] And Now for Something Completely Different

[Paul Moore]

On 20 July 2018 at 12:57, Victor Stinner <vstinner at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hum. Let me try to explain my point differently. Currently, some
> people don't read PEPs just because at the end, only the single BDFL
> vote counts. What's the point of spending hours (if not days) on
> reading a long PEP and the long discussion on mailing lists, if your
> count doesn't count?

My suspicion is that *most* people who don't read PEPs don't do so
because they don't have the time, not because they don't believe that
their opinion will matter. In actual fact, the evidence from many
threads is that people are more than happy to express their opinion
even though they haven't read the PEP. So I doubt that giving people
more power to affect the result will make little practical difference.

> Now imagine that all votes count. I expect that
> people will spend more time on reading carefully each PEP and follow
> more closely discussions since they will be de facto more involved in
> the decision process.

In contrast, I would imagine that people would continue to discuss
PEPs in exactly the same way that they currently do, so the result
would be that the votes are based more on partially-informed opinion
and "gut feeling". Certainly some people will work harder to provide
an informed vote, but I doubt that will be true in the majority of
cases. Worst case, people will feel a responsibility to vote, but
won't have any more time than they do right now so they'll vote with
limited information simply because "it's expected of them" to vote.

I suspect that the reality will be somewhere between these two extremes.

Paul