[ghc-steering-committee] GHC proposal process: merging and closing

[Spiwack, Arnaud]

Dear all,

Joachim directed me here to raise some remarks about the proposal process
that I've brought up.

Out of the hundred or so submitted proposals, only roughly half were
closed, including a mere 11 merged.

On the merging end, I noticed, in particular that the backpack proposal[1]
has not been merged. The reason being that it had been implemented before
the committee had time to evaluate it, hence became out of scope.

Why do we merge proposals? One reason proposal can be referred to by pull
requests authors to describe the changes that they're implementing. The
other reason that I can see is that proposals can serve as documentation:
they can be referred to inside the documentation to explain why things are
done the way they are, they can be browsed by curious onlookers who want to
understand the trade-offs that went into this particular design, we could
even consider linking to them in the manual as longer-form stand-alone
pieces of documentation for individual features.

>From that point of view the backpack proposal ought to have been merged: it
is still documentation after the implementation is finished. Irrespective
of whether the committee has had to work for it.

On the "closing" side, I think we should be better at triaging. It's less
important, of course, because forgotten PRs fall behind are not seen by
anybody. But it could help give a valuable feeling of tidiness. I believe a
tidy repo makes people feel more at ease with sharing their thoughts. And,
just as importantly, it would help Joachim to manage the proposals: with
40+ open proposals, you probably don't know which are active, which need a
push, where he could suggest that the committee get involved. If there were
only 15 proposals to track, Joachim's time would be more efficiently spent.

I don't believe we should hesitate to close a proposal which is not under
discussion any more, authors can still reopen when they want to get back to
discussing the matter. There are quite a few dormant proposals, also
out-of-scope which didn't receive any conversation of late, or
need-revision which don't seem to be seeing any update. These could all be
closed.

What does everybody think?

[1] https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/5

Best,
Arnaud Spiwack
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