Iavor Diatchki
Hello Ben,
I posted this when you originally asked for feed-back, but perhaps it got buried among the rest of the e-mails.
Indeed it seems that way. Sorry about that!
I think the proposal sounds fairly reasonable, but it is hard to say how well it will work in practice until we try it, and we should be ready to change it if needs be.
Right. I fully expect that we will have to iterate on it.
Some clarifying questions on the intended process: 1. After submitting the initial merge request, is the person making the proposal to wait for any kind of acknowledgment, or just move on to step 2?
The discussion phase can happen asynchronously from any action by the Committee. Of course, the Committee should engauge in discussion early, but I don't think any sort of acknowledgement is needed. An open pull request should be taken to mean "let's discuss this idea."
2. Is the discussion going to happen on one of the mailing lists, if so which? Is it the job of the proposing person to involve/notify the committee about the discussion? If so, how are they to find out who is on the committee?
The proposed process places the discussion in a pull request. The idea here is to use well-understood and widely-used code review tools to faciliate the conversation. The Committee members will be notified of the open pull request by the usual event notification mechanism (e.g. in GitHub one can subscribe to a repository).
3. How does one actually perform step 3, another pull request or simply an e-mail to someone?
The opening of the pull request would mark the beginning of the discussion period. When the author feels that the discussion has come to something of a conclusion, they will request that the GHC Committee consider the proposal for acceptable by leaving a comment on the pull request.
Typo: two separate bullets in the proposal are labelled as 4.
I believe this should be fixed now. Thanks! Cheers, - Ben