withastro / roadmap

Ideas, suggestions, and formal RFC proposals for the Astro project.
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[META] Add Goals/Non-Goals to RFC template #392

Closed FredKSchott closed 1 year ago

FredKSchott commented 1 year ago

This is something that has become a pattern in official RFCs that I would like to standardize across all RFCs by breaking up the "Motivation" section.

Calling out an RFC's explicit Goals and Non-Goals help focus the conversation. Without this, often the "Motivation" section becomes more about story-telling and less about clear, explicit context setting. By calling these out and using a bulleted list format, it forces the RFC author to think through and verbalize what they are trying to accomplish with their RFC.

While converting 1 section to 3 sections may look like adding more work, its intent is to cut down on the overall length of the RFC by encouraging the use of bulleted lists for some of the content that previously lived in "Motivation".

FredKSchott commented 1 year ago

@matthewp I actually didn't see your post here before creating this: https://github.com/withastro/rfcs/pull/373#issuecomment-1315784781

curious to get your thoughts since Ben's RFC began using a different template that included the explicit Goals/Non-Goals that are brought in with this PR. This PR tries to standardize this as a Good Pattern :tm: but to also asks the RFC author to be more concise (bullets required to encourage clear thinking).

matthewp commented 1 year ago

I'm happy with the split overall. In my head a Motivation is a little different. The motivation is often "lots of users ask for this" and that doesn't neatly fit into the Goal / Non-goal, but that probably doesn't need to be stated.

FredKSchott commented 1 year ago

I'm happy with the split overall. In my head a Motivation is a little different. The motivation is often "lots of users ask for this" and that doesn't neatly fit into the Goal / Non-goal, but that probably doesn't need to be stated.

True, I'll think about this a bit more. I agree that the subtext is that "Background" really exists to give evidence why the goals are important & valuable, so maybe "Motivation" is still an accurate fit. "Background & Motivation" is a bit of a mouthful but could also work.

matthewp commented 1 year ago

lgtm