Propose an RFC process for crates.io and cargo

sgrif commented 5 years ago

While we have the main RFC repo, team meetings, and issues/PRs, there's a big gap in how the existing tools serve these teams. We tend to have a lot of internal changes which impact the other team, or lower profile changes which would benefit from going through the RFC process, but would act as noise on the main RFC repo.

This RFC proposes a process for changes which impact both teams, or for user facing changes that don't justify landing on the main RFCs repo

sgrif commented 5 years ago

@rust-lang/crates-io @rust-lang/cargo We've been discussing having our own RFC process for a while now, I've taken a swing at laying out what that looks like.

nrc commented 5 years ago

I'm unsure about this. I definitely agree that some large features could do with some more discussion and it would be good to have a place to do that which is not the main RFC repo (but which is a shared space between the Cargo and crates.io teams). However, I see some drawbacks:

RFCs outside the RFC repo have tended to not get much discussion from those outside the core communities (e.g., style, async). This does mean discussion is a bit more streamlined, but it also means that it lacks the openness of having discussion in the RFC repo.
I'm wary of adding more process and bureaucracy to the process of designing features (it is a lot of work). This could be solved by having a much less formal template and process, but it would need some experimentation I think.
Being part of the existing RFC process has exhausted many members of the community (the level of dedication and energy required to create and discuss RFCs is high) and I do not want to burn out our teams this way, indeed I think one reason tools such as Cargo are attractive to work on is that you can have a big impact without having to engage with the RFC process.
The governance WG and core team will be looking to overhaul the main RFC process this year, and I'm a bit worried about interfering with that process or introducing one of our own and then having to redo it.

That's a pretty negative list, sorry. I do think there is a problem that needs solving here and I'm glad you're looking at addressing it!

carols10cents commented 5 years ago

cc @skade, does the governance team have any thoughts on this aside from wanting to know how it goes if we do this?

Centril commented 5 years ago

Btw; You may want to integrate https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2333 and https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2561 into your templates :)

rust-lang / crates-io-cargo-teams

Propose an RFC process for crates.io and cargo #35