Abstract

This PEP outlines the python-dev voting guidelines. These guidelines serve to provide feedback or gauge the “wind direction” on a particular proposal, idea, or feature. They don’t have a binding force.

Rationale

When a new idea, feature, patch, etc. is floated in the Python community, either through a PEP or on the mailing lists (most likely on python-dev [1]), it is sometimes helpful to gauge the community’s general sentiment. Sometimes people just want to register their opinion of an idea. Sometimes the BDFL wants to take a straw poll. Whatever the reason, these guidelines have been adopted so as to provide a common language for developers.

While opinions are (sometimes) useful, but they are never binding. Opinions that are accompanied by rationales are always valued higher than bare scores (this is especially true with -1 votes).

Voting Scores

The scoring guidelines are loosely derived from the Apache voting procedure [2], with of course our own spin on things. There are 4 possible vote scores:

• +1 I like it
• +0 I don’t care, but go ahead
• -0 I don’t care, so why bother?
• -1 I hate it

You may occasionally see wild flashes of enthusiasm (either for or against) with vote scores like +2, +1000, or -1000. These aren’t really valued much beyond the above scores, but it’s nice to see people get excited about such geeky stuff.

References

[1]

Python Developer’s Guide, (http://www.python.org/dev/)

[2]

Apache Project Guidelines and Voting Rules (http://httpd.apache.org/dev/guidelines.html)

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.