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Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2019 15:46:11 +0200
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To: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Improve visibility of RFC negative feedback
From: kjarli@gmail.com (Lynn)

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On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 3:19 PM Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Firstly, I would somewhat question why you need to know who holds an
> opinion. RFCs, and any dissenting opinions, are not manifestoes in
> elections, they are information presented so that you can form your own
> opinion. They should not be read as representative of "the group as a
> whole", but nor should the author be particularly important in most cases.
>
> That said, the current RFC template has an "author" field in the header,
> and Dan already proposed a convention of contributors "signing" dissenting
> opinions they agree with. The example you link to says "Author: Zeev
> Suraski", so I'm not sure what change you're proposing.
>

The current setup allows for a single author to write down counter
arguments. As the counter arguments seem to primarily be opinionated, I'm
interested to see who's opinion it is, as two people can have different
opinions on the same subject. If person 1 writes down "option A is bad
because of X", person 2 wants to write down that option A is also bad, but
not for the reason mentioned by person 2, and person 3 wants thinks the
arguments mentioned are actually pros and not cons, I don't see how that is
possible right now. That being said, I feel like this should be more of a
personal summary per person so everyone can look back what the opinions
were and why someone voted yes or no.

The mailing list is rather chaotic, even when using an interface such as
externals.io, and it's hard to get a summary of opinions, and some people
might not write down their opinions in the mailing list and will simply
vote. The counter argument page feels like a good idea to see why a certain
RFC should not be accepted, but why not extend it to a who votes on what
and why page? This would be very useful information for people who are not
active on the mailing list or externals.io and leeitheraves information
behind of why something wasn't accepted at the time.

At times when an RFC is accepted or rejected, a lot of people wonder why
this happened. "Why isn't this awesome RFC accepted?", "Why is the RFC
accepted while it brings more problems than it fixes?", "Why was a partial
solution accepted?". There's valuable information in the mailing list, yet
some conversations go off-topic fast or get spammed with mails that should
probably dealt with in direct conversations between some people, and this
makes it hard to follow.

> so I'm not sure what change you're proposing.

I suppose a page per person allowed to vote where they can summarize their
opinion on an RFC, whether it is in favor of, or against. The current setup
for counter arguments serves as a nice starting point, as we can read back
why people were against an RFC. This means instead of a direct link to a
single counter argument page with a single author, a link could be provided
to a page where multiple authors post their summary. This could of course
also be a page linking to other dedicated pages with one author per page.

Regards,
Lynn van der Berg

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