Mailing List Archive

Please be careful about changing PEPs post-submission to the SC
This is a personal plea (i.e. not coming from the SC at all), but in the
last month we have had PEPs changed twice post-submission to the SC. That's
a big time sink as we take multiple meetings to discuss a PEP and having
things change underneath us causes us to have to re-evaluate our
discussions (and I know I pretty much start thinking about PEPs once they
are submitted, whether we are actively discussing them or not and I'm
probably not the only SC member who does this).

I know no one did this maliciously or anything, but since it's happened
twice now I just want to ask people be cognizant of this. Please reach out
to the SC if you want to make a change so we can discuss whether we think
it will help/hurt the PEP, etc. and we are also not taken off-guard by
things shifting (assume we don't monitor the commits and PRs to the peps
repo, so unless you explicitly say, "hold on", we won't realize discussions
are ongoing in a PR or anything). If that means withdrawing your PEP for
consideration for a while that's totally fine and it won't hurt your
chances of acceptance once you're at a stable state with your PEP.

Once again, this is a personal ask and no one is mad at anyone. I'm just
asking people be very clear in communicating with us when they want to make
a change to a PEP or they have suddenly have an open issue they are still
discussing after they open an issue in the steering-council repo for us to
review a PEP and need us to stop considering their PEP for a while.
Re: Please be careful about changing PEPs post-submission to the SC [ In reply to ]
I know PEP 646 was one of these. In our defense, we *did* notify the SC
that there was a pending issue (
https://github.com/python/steering-council/issues/59#issuecomment-951728233),
although at the time we didn't anticipate it to become such a contentious
discussion between the PEP authors. (Though, while contentious, it's still
a minor edge case in the PEP, and I don't think it would affect the SC's
position which way we eventually end up going.)

I'm guessing that the recommended approach in such a case is just to close
the SC issue and reopen it once the PEP is updated?

On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 12:04 PM Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:

> This is a personal plea (i.e. not coming from the SC at all), but in the
> last month we have had PEPs changed twice post-submission to the SC. That's
> a big time sink as we take multiple meetings to discuss a PEP and having
> things change underneath us causes us to have to re-evaluate our
> discussions (and I know I pretty much start thinking about PEPs once they
> are submitted, whether we are actively discussing them or not and I'm
> probably not the only SC member who does this).
>
> I know no one did this maliciously or anything, but since it's happened
> twice now I just want to ask people be cognizant of this. Please reach out
> to the SC if you want to make a change so we can discuss whether we think
> it will help/hurt the PEP, etc. and we are also not taken off-guard by
> things shifting (assume we don't monitor the commits and PRs to the peps
> repo, so unless you explicitly say, "hold on", we won't realize discussions
> are ongoing in a PR or anything). If that means withdrawing your PEP for
> consideration for a while that's totally fine and it won't hurt your
> chances of acceptance once you're at a stable state with your PEP.
>
> Once again, this is a personal ask and no one is mad at anyone. I'm just
> asking people be very clear in communicating with us when they want to make
> a change to a PEP or they have suddenly have an open issue they are still
> discussing after they open an issue in the steering-council repo for us to
> review a PEP and need us to stop considering their PEP for a while.
> _______________________________________________
> Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org
> To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/
> Message archived at
> https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/ZLC3H2XLEYJLFV3TRQ2EWRKRGZZ7DRMC/
> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
>


--
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
*Pronouns: he/him **(why is my pronoun here?)*
<http://feministing.com/2015/02/03/how-using-they-as-a-singular-pronoun-can-change-the-world/>
Re: Please be careful about changing PEPs post-submission to the SC [ In reply to ]
FWIW that seems like a reasonable approach, at least to me.

On Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 5:29 PM Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

> I know PEP 646 was one of these. In our defense, we *did* notify the SC
> that there was a pending issue (
> https://github.com/python/steering-council/issues/59#issuecomment-951728233),
> although at the time we didn't anticipate it to become such a contentious
> discussion between the PEP authors. (Though, while contentious, it's still
> a minor edge case in the PEP, and I don't think it would affect the SC's
> position which way we eventually end up going.)
>
> I'm guessing that the recommended approach in such a case is just to close
> the SC issue and reopen it once the PEP is updated?
>
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 12:04 PM Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
>
>> This is a personal plea (i.e. not coming from the SC at all), but in the
>> last month we have had PEPs changed twice post-submission to the SC. That's
>> a big time sink as we take multiple meetings to discuss a PEP and having
>> things change underneath us causes us to have to re-evaluate our
>> discussions (and I know I pretty much start thinking about PEPs once they
>> are submitted, whether we are actively discussing them or not and I'm
>> probably not the only SC member who does this).
>>
>> I know no one did this maliciously or anything, but since it's happened
>> twice now I just want to ask people be cognizant of this. Please reach out
>> to the SC if you want to make a change so we can discuss whether we think
>> it will help/hurt the PEP, etc. and we are also not taken off-guard by
>> things shifting (assume we don't monitor the commits and PRs to the peps
>> repo, so unless you explicitly say, "hold on", we won't realize discussions
>> are ongoing in a PR or anything). If that means withdrawing your PEP for
>> consideration for a while that's totally fine and it won't hurt your
>> chances of acceptance once you're at a stable state with your PEP.
>>
>> Once again, this is a personal ask and no one is mad at anyone. I'm just
>> asking people be very clear in communicating with us when they want to make
>> a change to a PEP or they have suddenly have an open issue they are still
>> discussing after they open an issue in the steering-council repo for us to
>> review a PEP and need us to stop considering their PEP for a while.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org
>> To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/
>> Message archived at
>> https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/ZLC3H2XLEYJLFV3TRQ2EWRKRGZZ7DRMC/
>> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
>>
>
>
> --
> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
> *Pronouns: he/him **(why is my pronoun here?)*
> <http://feministing.com/2015/02/03/how-using-they-as-a-singular-pronoun-can-change-the-world/>
> _______________________________________________
> Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org
> To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/
> Message archived at
> https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/WJOTJ6V7XKRMDESEF3BD4DHOP4C3TRNK/
> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
>
Re: Please be careful about changing PEPs post-submission to the SC [ In reply to ]
On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 2:25 PM Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

> I know PEP 646 was one of these.
>

I purposefully didn't "out" anyone, but yes. ????


> In our defense, we *did* notify the SC that there was a pending issue (
> https://github.com/python/steering-council/issues/59#issuecomment-951728233),
> although at the time we didn't anticipate it to become such a contentious
> discussion between the PEP authors.
>

You definitely did, but I know I had personally assumed it was already
resolved and committed based on the wording being past tense and the change
being classified as small.


> (Though, while contentious, it's still a minor edge case in the PEP, and I
> don't think it would affect the SC's position which way we eventually end
> up going.)
>

Yeah, probably not a big deal in the end.


>
> I'm guessing that the recommended approach in such a case is just to close
> the SC issue and reopen it once the PEP is updated?
>

Yeah, I think so. Just saying something like, "closing this for now as we
have discovered something that we need to resolve first; will re-open and
leave a comment when we are ready again" is helpful to let us know to
simply halt thinking and discussing the PEP.


>
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 12:04 PM Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
>
>> This is a personal plea (i.e. not coming from the SC at all), but in the
>> last month we have had PEPs changed twice post-submission to the SC. That's
>> a big time sink as we take multiple meetings to discuss a PEP and having
>> things change underneath us causes us to have to re-evaluate our
>> discussions (and I know I pretty much start thinking about PEPs once they
>> are submitted, whether we are actively discussing them or not and I'm
>> probably not the only SC member who does this).
>>
>> I know no one did this maliciously or anything, but since it's happened
>> twice now I just want to ask people be cognizant of this. Please reach out
>> to the SC if you want to make a change so we can discuss whether we think
>> it will help/hurt the PEP, etc. and we are also not taken off-guard by
>> things shifting (assume we don't monitor the commits and PRs to the peps
>> repo, so unless you explicitly say, "hold on", we won't realize discussions
>> are ongoing in a PR or anything). If that means withdrawing your PEP for
>> consideration for a while that's totally fine and it won't hurt your
>> chances of acceptance once you're at a stable state with your PEP.
>>
>> Once again, this is a personal ask and no one is mad at anyone. I'm just
>> asking people be very clear in communicating with us when they want to make
>> a change to a PEP or they have suddenly have an open issue they are still
>> discussing after they open an issue in the steering-council repo for us to
>> review a PEP and need us to stop considering their PEP for a while.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org
>> To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/
>> Message archived at
>> https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/ZLC3H2XLEYJLFV3TRQ2EWRKRGZZ7DRMC/
>> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
>>
>
>
> --
> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
> *Pronouns: he/him **(why is my pronoun here?)*
> <http://feministing.com/2015/02/03/how-using-they-as-a-singular-pronoun-can-change-the-world/>
>