At this time I am most definitely NOT interested in PEP as a legislative format. The core developers of the project are working under their own initiative and should be able to set the technical direction however they see fit, especially at such a crucial juncture.
Still, PEPs provide something invaluable. They're a record of the dialectic, one that tracks the developers' mental models as they move toward a shared understanding. At the moment this record is either missing, incomplete, or spread across several individual blogs. My request, moreover, is that the dialectic be pulled into one place and formalized. Note that I'm not asking for additional design documentation in the traditional sense. Design docs are static; they say "This is where we're at now" and don't include much of "This is how we got here." What's important to newcomers, most especially those that have the desire to contribute to the project at a high level, is not a pedagogical treatment of the existing design but an ability to track the decision-making process that led to it. Another nice thing about the PEP format is that it says to the user community, "If you've done due diligence, we're listening." While public mailing lists are reasonably informative, there's typically no barrier to entry. Whether we like it or not this establishes a particular tone and context for interactions. Though the dialog on pylons-discuss is tolerant - which is good - it is often not as technical or productive as it could be. The basic expectations of a PEP, on the other hand, are that the authors have reviewed the relevant documentation, spent lots of time with the code, and are presenting (with citations) a detailed account of their perspective for peer review. Those expectations create a forum that serves technical progress while still giving weight to the public's commentary. Maybe the best way to understand my request is for me to state my bias outright: From my perspective, the Pylons project is engaged in nothing short of a full-blown research exercise. Groups of people have been doing this kind of thing for a long time and they've pretty much all arrived a common mode of discourse. See also: "RFCs," "Transactions," "Nature," etc., etc. PEPs are just Python's version of dedicated research literature and I'm the guy suggesting that we're at the point where we should probably start our own journal. Cheers! ~br -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en.
