GitHub Issues for DEP repository?

[Kevin Christopher Henry]

Hello,

With all the talk of DEPs flying around I thought I'd finally take a look at one in detail.

I wanted to make a suggestion about it and realized that there wasn't really a good place to do so. The issue was too minor for a mailing list discussion, and there was no open pull request to comment on. My first instinct was to file a GitHub issue (and DEP 1 says "you can submit corrections as GitHub issues") but it seems that Issues has been disabled for this repository. Was that just an oversight?

More broadly, I think that DEP 1 makes this subject too complicated: "How you report a bug, or submit a DEP update depends on several factors, such as the maturity of the DEP, the preferences of the DEP author, and the nature of your comments. For the early draft stages of the DEP, it's probably best to send your comments and changes directly to the DEP author. For more mature, or finished DEPs you can submit corrections as GitHub issues or pull requests against the DEP repository. When in doubt about where to send your changes, please check first with the DEP author and/or a core developer."

It adds some friction to the process to ask someone to contact the DEP author directly to ask them whether or not they should contact them directly with their comments. I think it would be more straightforward to just use the usual complement of open-source tools that we all know and love: the developers mailing list, pull requests, and an issue tracker.

I would have filed this as an issue, but... :-)

[Carl Meyer]

Hi Kevin,

On 05/10/2016 11:24 PM, Kevin Christopher Henry wrote:
> With all the talk of DEPs flying around I thought I'd finally take a
> look at one in detail.
>
> I wanted to make a suggestion about it and realized that there wasn't
> really a good place to do so. The issue was too minor for a mailing list
> discussion, and there was no open pull request to comment on. My first
> instinct was to file a GitHub issue (and DEP 1 says "you can submit
> corrections as GitHub issues") but it seems that Issues has been
> disabled for this repository. Was that just an oversight?

Given that DEP 1 specifically mentions using GH issues to comment on
DEPs, I'm considering this a bug/oversight: I went ahead and enabled GH
issues on the DEPs repo. Thanks for pointing it out!

> More broadly, I think that DEP 1 makes this subject too complicated:
> "How you report a bug, or submit a DEP update depends on several
> factors, such as the maturity of the DEP, the preferences of the DEP
> author, and the nature of your comments. For the early draft stages of
> the DEP, it's probably best to send your comments and changes directly
> to the DEP author. For more mature, or finished DEPs you can submit
> corrections as GitHub issues or pull requests against the DEP
> repository. When in doubt about where to send your changes, please check
> first with the DEP author and/or a core developer."
>
> It adds some friction to the process to ask someone to contact the DEP
> author directly to ask them whether or not they should contact them
> directly with their comments. I think it would be more straightforward
> to just use the usual complement of open-source tools that we all know
> and love: the developers mailing list, pull requests, and an issue tracker.

I agree with this: I think it's better to encourage keeping things in
public rather than encourage privately contacting DEP authors (as a DEP
author, I'd certainly rather have suggestions made in public than be
contacted privately, even in early draft stages). So I'd personally be
fine with a PR to amend this section to remove mention of private
contact. Jacob, I think you wrote this (or adapted it from PEP 1) -- any
thoughts?

Carl

[Jacob Kaplan-Moss]

On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 1:11 PM, Carl Meyer <ca...@oddbird.net> wrote:

So I'd personally be
fine with a PR to amend this section to remove mention of private
contact. Jacob, I think you wrote this (or adapted it from PEP 1) -- any
thoughts?

I don't recall why that's in there; I'm guessing it came over verbatim from PEP 1 without much consideration. Yes, thumbs up on using public comms in general.

Jacob