Re: Evergreen Formal Objection handling (ESFO)

On 3/20/19 10:41 AM, Chris Wilson wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 10:37 AM Michael Champion <Michael.Champion@microsoft.com 
> <mailto:Michael.Champion@microsoft.com>> wrote:
> 
>      > "Current work" in that model is a bunch of unmerged pull-requests,
>     Unmerged pull requests don't have "truth" status.  Active participants in spec development have
>     to look at the unmerged PRs, sure, but implementers/website developers/framework developers/etc
>     don’t need to, do they?
> 
> +1 to this.  Once there's sufficient belief that it represents consensus and is error-free 
> (determinations a WG could decide their own rules for), they would get merged. I should have said 
> "current truth" rather than "current work".

For a spec to be REC-level, it needs
   a) consensus under wide review
   b) tests
   c) two implementations

I don't imagine that an Evergreen Recommendation would be any different,
therefore each change as it goes in must have all of the above. However,
there's often a time gap between having a) and having b) and c). The
amount of time lag between agreement on a proposal and two demonstrably
interoperable implementation can vary greatly, from a few weeks for a
well-coordinated fix, to years.

If the agreed changes are not known to implementers, then implementers
working on that area of the codebase will not know about them, and may
end up compounding the amount of work necessary in the future and/or
implement the wrong thing. Additionally, anyone reviewing a spec needs
to know about impending changes. It's one thing to have a PR with
tentative changes while you discuss them for a couple weeks to get the
wording right. It's another to have pending changes that represent
consensus hanging around in a PR for months and years.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 20 March 2019 22:18:20 UTC