Here are my own thoughts on how the pull request discussion for union types went...
I think the main takeaway for me is that inline comments (on specific lines in the RFC) were really invaluable. Each comment thread discussed a specific issue and most of them have resulted in a direct improvement to the RFC. Generally there was a lot of discussion of specific technical details that we very rarely see in RFC discussions. Current RFC discussions on the mailing list tend to be rather high level (which is fine in itself), with nobody ever discussing the details (which is very bad). Thinking back to https://wiki.php.net/rfc/engine_warnings, I think that RFC could have really benefited from this discussion medium. While the mailing list discussion ended up talking circles around more or less one single question (undefined variables), pretty much none of the other parts of the RFC have seen so much as a comment. I'm sure that there would be a lot more discussion regarding specific classifications if this went up as a pull request. Another nice thing is that it's possible to mark a comment thread as resolved, once the RFC has been adjusted to address the comments. That way you don't have to see issues that were already addressed (though you can if you like). Having thumbs-up and thumbs-down reactions to comments was also helpful to judge whether some comment represents a minority opinion or not, something that is notoriously hard with current mailing list discussions (which are almost dominated by "negative" opinions which mysteriously don't show up in voting results). However, while the inline comments were pleasantly insightful, the same cannot be said for the top-level comments on the pull request. The majority of them was borderline off-topic. While some in principle interesting discussion happened there, it simply didn't belong in the RFC thread for union types. The top-level comments also suffered from a lack of threading -- I would have been less bothered about tangential discussions if they were threaded. (To be fair: I use gmail, so I don't get threading on the mailing list either.) If this kind of discussion behavior is representative, then I would suggest a workflow alone the following lines... * RFCs are submitted as PRs on GitHub, but must be announced on the mailing list. * The PR description should have a fat warning that top-level comments belong on the mailing list. We can mark all top-level comments on PRs as "off-topic" as a matter of general policy. * Top-level commentary stays on the mailing list. This is a shift from what I originally had in mind (completely moving the RFC process to GitHub), towards providing a way for more detailed and specific feedback on the RFC text. Regarding GitHub as a 3rd party. I think there are a few things to considered: * We're already very heavily reliant on GitHub. Most of my day-to-day interaction with PHP core development is via GitHub and most of the day-to-day decisions also happen there. Only the major stuff everhits this mailing list. * The RFC repo would of course be hosted on git.php.net as usual and only be mirrored to GitHub. * GitHub would not be the exclusive venue for RFC discussion. All RFCs are still announced on internals and the top-level discussion can and should still happen here. Disclaimer: I'm trying to draw conclusions here from an experiment with a sample size of 1, which may not be representative. Union types are a pretty significant proposal (and also the first one to be on GH), and other, smaller proposals might well have different discussion dynamics. Regards, Nikita On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 12:22 PM 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 . > > Côme > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > >
