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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

[Aside to Guido: Oops, I think I accidentally sent you a contentless
reply.  Sorry!]

As a suggestion, I think this is relevant to everybody who might be
writing a PEP, so I'm cross-posting to Python-Dev.  Probably no
discussion is needed, but Reply-To is set to Python-Ideas.

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.