Hi Dan,
I'm picking out the below into its own thread, to avoid derailing the
particular RFC discussion where you mentioned it.
I don't think this email list is a great place to work through all of
those details. Email is not a great medium for this type of discussion
in general, and causes a lot of noise for people who are not taking
part in that work.Some of the people who are interested in working on how to implement
generics in PHP have been doing that in a github repo
https://github.com/PHPGenerics/php-generics-rfc/issuesIf you have the energy to work on this, please consider opening a
similar repo as a place for people to discuss ideas and work through
all the details, as that would be far more likely to have a productive
discussion and produce the best possible RFC*. oh, and obviously link
to that repo here so people can join that conversation.
While I agree that the mailing list is an imperfect collaboration tool,
I am not at all convinced that threads you are not taking part in
constitute "noise" (as opposed to off-topic messages in threads you
are taking part in). If you're using a mail client that doesn't
support any kind of threading, switch to one that does, and simply
ignore threads you're not interested in.
I'm equally unconvinced (as noted previously) that github is a good
replacement technology here - its support for threading and keeping
track of what you've read is worse than most mail clients. The ability
to propose changes to an agreed text as pull requests is an interesting
one, but I notice that's not currently being used in that example.
More importantly, though, I think fragmenting discussions into lots of
separate forums is bad for the project as a whole. At worst, it leads to
small groups making a series of decisions, and then using the RFC
process only to defend those proposals, rather than iterate them, as
discussed here: https://externals.io/message/109076#109153 The repo you
link to there is a case in point - I can't find any message to the list
which invited anyone to "join that conversation".
My opinion is that this list - or its successor - should always be
used to co-ordinate discussions, with regular summaries of what's been
discussed off-list being posted or linked to here so that one
subscription is enough to get an idea of what's going on. If an e-mail
list is really not fit for that purpose, we should look at what would be
- a web-based forum with good threading and notification support would
seem the obvious alternative.
Regards,
--
Rowan Tommins (né Collins)
[IMSoP]