[Python-Dev] A suggestion: Do proto-PEPs in Google Docs

[Collin Winter]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 7:17 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<turnbull at sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
> 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