Thanks for the feedback!
Isn't "just contributing to a Scheme system" or "writing a library for
snow-fort/akku.scm" essentially the "lightweight design process"?
Nope, those are missing the social element which is the main ingredient.
Everyone going off to write their own library is how the worldwide Lisp
and Scheme communities have done design work until now (save for SRFI,
RnRS, and the Common Lisp standard). This has gone on for 3-4 decades
and empirically, those libraries don't convergence into one cohesive
collection. Many in the CL community would like to refresh the CL
standard but it doesn't work out because they're missing the right
social process.
Especially if you want to permit mistakes/erroneous decisions?
Yes, this is one of the key points.
Isn't that basically "I develop things as a library, people try it, test
it, decide that it is not worth, and port their programs away from
relying on it"?
The key is collective ownership and giving everyone permission to fix
things that break their workflow; more below.
If you want a proper discussion step for the proposals, the one that
wouldn't just amount to something like the github code-review feature,
that would be nice to have, but it seems hard to achieve, because even
srfis, that are far more polished pieces of text, prepared to be read by
humans, are not always getting all the attention they need.
Arguing in GH issues or a mailing list is fine as far as I'm concerned :)
I predict that less formal stuff will get more attention. The key thing
is that everyone involved in the process has full rights to commit code
at any time, so if someone sees something broken or missing, they can
just go fix it. Ownership and immediate results are motivating.
There would be no formal process to prevent people from messing up
others' work. We'd rely on informal social customs to prevent it and use
`git revert` to fix any mistakes.
Sorry for being critical, but I think that the problem here is not
really the lack of a due process, but a lack of workforce.
Not critical at all :)
Workforce is also on the low end, but it seems to fluctuate a lot based
on motivation. I assume more immediate results would boost motivation.
