Taylor Fausak wrote:
It has been a week since I submitted my proposal. During that time, 28 people voted, with 16 expressing approval and 12 expressing disapproval. To everyone that voted so far: Thank you! You made for interesting discussion.
I thought the standard of approval for library proposals was a broad consensus for adoptation, which we clearly do not have here. It was supposed to be a reasoned decision based on arguments put forward by proponents and opponents of the idea. There has always been a tendency to express agreement or disagreement numerically, but recently these agreements and disagreements have been treated as a voting system, and I believe that's an unhealthy trend. With a simple majority-based straw poll on the mailing list we risk ending up with a ton of questionable additions to the core libraries that have a handful of outspoken proponents and nobody who really cares; the end result will be, predictably, a library full of functions that nobody ever uses. In the case of a dispute (which we have here), the decision should be made by the maintainer(s), i.e. the Core Libraries Committee in this case. As maintainers, they are also in a better position to address concerns like consistency (which is hard to obtain by incrementally adding small functions.) Perhaps we should also consider that voting takes almost no effort, whereas composing a coherent argument takes much time and effort. Overall I believe we should go back to weighing arguments rather than voting for library proposals. Cheers, Bertram