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

[Simon Marlow]

Both points make a lot of sense to me.

Cheers
Simon

On 23 February 2018 at 14:08, Spiwack, Arnaud <arnaud.spiwack at tweag.io>
wrote:

> 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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