[Meta] Specify the TLA+ enhancement process

[lemmy]

What should the TLA+ enhancement process look like?

• What kind of change "requires" an RFC (where do bugs stop)?
• How to include the voices of the community at large?
• Who gets to vote?
• How is related work organized and tracked that potentially spans multiple organizations/companies?
• Do we want to and, if yes, how to unite research- and engineering-focused efforts (research doesn't want to be scooped)?
• ...

Goals

• Foster wider adoption of TLA+ (the idea of high-level specs) in industry and education
• Provide a way for the community to express their support for enhancements
• Consistency of the TLA+ ecosystem
• Guarantee "vendor neutrality"
• Inclusiveness
• Foster research
• ...

TODO

• Lay out rules of engagement => code of conduct

[lemmy]

The repository name should change from RFCs to something that better communicates that this is also about bigger enhancements still in the requirements phase? It also has to be made clear that proposers cannot expect others to do the work; proposing an enhancement ideally creates synergies, but the proposer is the driver.

[konnov]

Shall we add "foster wide industry adoption" to the goals?

[ligurio]

I'm not about process, but anyway. It may be worth to create an issue template with recommended fields and parts of RFC. GH allows to create it, see https://docs.github.com/en/communities/using-templates-to-encourage-useful-issues-and-pull-requests/configuring-issue-templates-for-your-repository

[lemmy]

@ligurio Great idea, do you know of a popular/matching template we could re-use?

[ligurio]

I would start with at least following sections:

• summary with short description of proposal
• proposal itself
• a list of things in scope and out of scope
• motivation and use cases
• benefits
• drawbacks

I hope it would enough for start.

P.S. see also RFC templates in reactjs project, tensorflow and rust-lang.

Update: GH discussions can be used for discussing RFCs, we found it very convenient in our project.

[lemmy]

The Technical Charter provides scaffolding: https://foundation.tlapl.us/docs/TLA%2B%20Project%20Technical%20Charter.pdf