Switching to pull requests for design proposals

[wipfli]

I have sometimes a hard time understanding at what stage a design proposal is. I think the problem is that we currently use issues for design proposals which are basically a running discussion thread. There is no clear signal if the design proposal was accepted, rejected, or is waiting for feedback from the author or other community members.

To improve that situation we could start using labels like "approved", or "waiting for feedback" as one solution.

Or we could start using pull request for design proposals. The advantage of pull requests would be that you have at the end of the process a written document which states what the plan is and which everyone hopefully has agreed on.

What do you think @HarelM and @louwers as maintainers? What do you think @msbarry and @DavidBuerer as people who recently contributed design proposals?

Thanks for the feedback in advance!

[louwers]

I think most of the time it makes sense to have a discussion up front before a design proposal is written. Some of the design proposal issues are more vague ideas, and that is OK too.

Instead of labels I would use a Project, because there's an associated board with a clear progression.

Maybe we can start with:

• "Idea"
• "Gathering Feedback" - when a concrete design has crystalized.
• "Approved" - when there is a consensus around a concrete design and it can be implemented.
• "Added" - when a a design proposal was added to the spec.
• "Rejected" - when a proposal failed to gather enough approval.

[HarelM]

The question from my point if view is how to track implementation of the spec changes. Issues and PRs are relatively similar in terms of a discussion in Github, so I don't have strong feelings either way. A possible problem with a PR is that it talks about implementation in some cases, and starting a discussion after someone opened a PR is sometime discouraging, or at least this is how I perceive it.

Regarding the state - if the spec (v8.json and/or the docs) was updated then a decision for the spec update was approved, otherwise, it wasn't.

Since this is a community decision, sometimes it's hard to define when something is approved, or what other information is needed to get it approved.

But, feel free to push a process change to improve this.