On Thu, 5 Sep 2019 at 11:22, Côme Chilliet <c...@opensides.be> wrote:
> Le jeudi 5 septembre 2019, 12:04:55 CEST Brent a écrit : > > > Huge "no" from me on using github for discussing RFCs. > > > > Care to elaborate why? The majority seems to like it. Though I am also > curious about Nikita's experience with it, as he is the one having to > process the feedback. > > Because the PHP project should avoid depending on a privately owned > centralized service for its technical discussions, and should not encourage > (some would say force) people to use such platforms. > > PHP is already on github but it’s only a mirror, the main git repository > is at git.php.net . > The "privately owned" and "centralized" parts don't bother me particularly, but there's potentially an issue in splitting the discussion between multiple platforms, with different logins required. An example of this is the discussion on this RFC about type aliases - Nikita requested it to be split into a separate discussion, but the people involved may not be subscribed to this list, and if they are, it's hard to maintain context when jumping between different forums. That conversation also highlighted a limitation of the particular platform: inline comments on GitHub PRs show as threads, but comments on the whole PR don't, so that interleaved discussions are hard to follow. Admittedly, that's true on a lot of e-mail clients as well (thanks to GMail popularising "conversations" rather than "threads"), but at least views like externals.io and news.php.net can let you navigate the tree. I wonder if a hybrid approach would work better - the RFC is a PR (perhaps against the language spec repo, as Andrea suggested) but the main discussion stays on the list. Suggestions to improve the RFC itself could be made inline on the PR by anyone who wanted to, but non-inline PR comments would be heavily discouraged so that wider comments on the proposal would stay here. Either way, I think it's interesting to experiment with different ways of working, and maybe there are other platforms we should trial as well. Regards, -- Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]
