On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 04:20:58PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> I want perl 6's internal API to have the same sort of artistic integrity
> that the language has. That's not, unfortunately, possible with everyone
> having equal say. I'd like it to be otherwise, but that's just not possible
> with people involved.
There are many people who have good taste and experience where the Perl API
is concerned. Forcing those people to come to a majority vote on every
PDD isn't going to fly. The answer isn't to reduce that set of people to
one person; Larry doesn't scale exponentially.
> The point is definitely *not* to do any sort of consolidation of power.
> Anyone reasonably sane, capable, and interested is welcome to chair any of
> the internals design lists and/or be responsible for shepherding a PDD to
> solidity. That's fine with me. (In fact I'd be thrilled if the design was
> handled by a host of folks that weren't me)
There are only a small number of people who can bless/unbless a
PDD into a standard or forcibly withdraw it from consideration.
It's good that there's a small number (>1) is involved, but it's
bad that each of those people can singlehandedly bless/unbless
something.
>From p5p, we saw that if 2 or 3 people objected to a proposal/idea/patch,
it was probably flawed in some way. OTOH, if 3 or 4 of those same
people saw merit in a proposal/idea/patch, then it was probably
worthy of consideration[*]. This is one of the ways where p5p
worked well (and where the RFC process failed). We should formalize
this for the Perl6 API process.
The first order of business should be to determine the process by
which PDDs become accepted/rejected/mentored/etc. Next, we find
the people with good taste and spare tuits to accept/reject/mentor
proposals through the process.
Z.
*: This is the audience-participation variant of "throw it at the pumpking
and see if he accepts it."
