Ben Finney wrote:
I don't know about Guido, but I'd be −1 on suggestions to add more
normative information to PEP 7, PEP 8, PEP 257, or any other established
style guide PEP. I certainly don't want to have to keep going back to
the same documents frequently just to see if the set of recommendations
I already know has changed recently.
This is not a problem unique to any specific PEP. How do we learn about
any changes that might interest us? What are the alternatives?
- our knowledge is fixed to what we knew at some particular date, and
gets further and further obsolete as time goes by;
- we actively search out new knowledge;
- we wait for somebody to tell us that something we knew has changed.
(E.g. I was rather surprised to learn that, sometime over the last few
years, the number of extra-solar planets known to astronomers have
increased from the one or two I was aware of to multiple dozens.)
All three strategies have advantages and disadvantages.
Regardless of whether future versions of the style-guide are called "PEP
8" or whether they are given new names ("PEP 8" -> "PEP 88" -> ...), we
have the identical problem -- how do we know whether or not there is a
new version of the style guide to look for? In twelve months time, how
sure will we be that PEP 88 is the most recent version to look for?
Perhaps we missed the release of PEP 95.
The one advantage of giving each revision of the document an updated
name is that, under some circumstances, we *might* be able to detect a
new revision easily. If I think that PEP 88 is the most recent version,
and somebody says that the recommended style guide is PEP 89, I might:
- think that he merely made a mistake, and meant to say 88; or
- think that there is a new document for me to look at.
Rather, I took Guido's mention of “this belongs in a style guide” as
suggesting a *new* style guide. Perhaps one that explicitly obsoletes an
existing one or perhaps not; either way, the updated normative
recommendations are in a new document with a new name, so that one knows
whether one has already read it.
How do you know which is the most recent version of the style guide to
look at? Instead of doing a O(1) lookup of PEP 8, you have to follow a
potentially O(N) search:
PEP 8 is obsoleted by PEP 88... go and look at PEP 88.
PEP 88 is obsoleted by PEP 93... go at look at PEP 93.
PEP 93 is obsoleted by PEP 123... go and look at PEP 123.
PEP 123 doesn't contain an "obsoleted by" notice, so:
(1) either it is the current document, or
(2) it has been obsoleted, but the link to the new version was missed,
and it is now very hard to discover what the current document is called.
Personally, I don't think the current PEP arrangement is broken enough
to change it. Each PEP is already tracked in VCS and history is
available for it. There's insufficient advantage, and some disadvantage,
to splitting each revision of the PEPs into new documents with new
names. -1 on the idea.
--
Steven
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