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Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2019 12:08:21 +0100
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To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Union Types v2 (followup on github usage)
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Tommins)

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On Thu, 5 Sep 2019 at 11:22, C=C3=B4me Chilliet <come@opensides.be> wrote:

> Le jeudi 5 septembre 2019, 12:04:55 CEST Brent a =C3=A9crit :
> > > Huge "no" from me on using github for discussing RFCs.
> >
> > Care to elaborate why? The majority seems to like it. Though I am also
> curious about Nikita's experience with it, as he is the one having to
> process the feedback.
>
> Because the PHP project should avoid depending on a privately owned
> centralized service for its technical discussions, and should not encoura=
ge
> (some would say force) people to use such platforms.
>
> PHP is already on github but it=E2=80=99s only a mirror, the main git rep=
ository
> is at git.php.net .
>


The "privately owned" and "centralized" parts don't bother me particularly,
but there's potentially an issue in splitting the discussion between
multiple platforms, with different logins required. An example of this is
the discussion on this RFC about type aliases - Nikita requested it to be
split into a separate discussion, but the people involved may not be
subscribed to this list, and if they are, it's hard to maintain context
when jumping between different forums.

That conversation also highlighted a limitation of the particular platform:
inline comments on GitHub PRs show as threads, but comments on the whole PR
don't, so that interleaved discussions are hard to follow. Admittedly,
that's true on a lot of e-mail clients as well (thanks to GMail
popularising "conversations" rather than "threads"), but at least views
like externals.io and news.php.net can let you navigate the tree.

I wonder if a hybrid approach would work better - the RFC is a PR (perhaps
against the language spec repo, as Andrea suggested) but the main
discussion stays on the list. Suggestions to improve the RFC itself could
be made inline on the PR by anyone who wanted to, but non-inline PR
comments would be heavily discouraged so that wider comments on the
proposal would stay here.

Either way, I think it's interesting to experiment with different ways of
working, and maybe there are other platforms we should trial as well.

Regards,
--=20
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]

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