[Python-Dev] A suggestion: Do proto-PEPs in Google Docs (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sat Feb 21 04:56:22 CET 2009

Summary:

Google Docs is easy to use, featureful, and here now. Since AIUI the PEPs eventually need to be hosted at python.org, I see Google Docs as an immediate replacement for email transmission of early drafts of PEPs, not as a permanent solution to PEP storage.

William Dode writes:

Isn't it the good oportunity to try a DVCS ?

I thought about that (and if I agreed I wouldn't have posted), but there are reasons why Guido is "looking forward to" rather than "calling for volunteers". ISTM that a DVCS is just a wiki where you can't find stuff unless you're told where it is. It will take time.

What Google Docs provided for me was an infrastructure that accomplished several useful services automatically, and stayed out of my face (except for the lack of pruning of uninteresting revisions).

IMO the features we want are

(1) a permanent, easily computed URN for the draft document repo -- DVCS can do this, with straightforward support from python.org -- wiki can do this as a convention such as reserving PEP_0374 for final doc with PEP_0374_draft for development (2) editor control over access to individual documents -- AFAIK there's no mechanism for this at python.org, so to use a DVCS would require developing one -- no mechanism for this in most wikis AFAIK (but ZWiki can do it) -- it could be argued that the current convention of people staying out of each others' space would work, but what about non-committers (like me)? (3) automatic merging of concurrent work -- DVCS does this, but needs to be pushed afterward -- most wikis can't do this in the framework of a single document, but you could organize the doc by sections for drafting (4) automatic saves of intermediate work -- at the tweak stage, the effort to save, commit, and push to a DVCS outweighs the effort to tweak, costing a lot of polish IME -- wikis don't do this, and I wonder whether people would be willing to save unpolished work, or leave it sitting in the browser "until later" (5) a recorded out of band channel for the editors (when plural) to comment -- "XXX" can work but when it's scutwork (eg, researching URLs or reworking sections to have parallel organization) it's ugly and distracting for non-editors to read; DVCS by itself provides no such medium, one would need to be developed -- ditto wikis (although Wikipedia has its linked discussion channels, and this could be emulated on any wiki by a convention such as PEP_0374_talk, which would have the advantage that interested non-editors could look at the comments and contribute URLs and ideas, etc) -- for non-trivial work, mail/IRC doesn't really cut it; you're more likely to make the indicated tweak if you're working on the document anyway, mail/IRC is likely to be focused elsewhere and the cost of changing focus too high to do it now

(1) and (2) are obvious, I think, and I don't know how much (3) really matters when the editors are a small group. But I was surprised by how much (4), and (5) contributed to my experience working on PEP 0374. Maybe Brett, Barry, or Alexandre would like to comment?

I note that the FSF had a rather complex system for its collaborative development of 3d generation licenses. I don't think that's necessary for most PEPs.

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