[Zope3-dev] Development methodology (Re: [Zope-CMF] Future CMF) (rant)

[Guido van Rossum]

> Python's been using PEP's fairly successfully, and Perl's using
> RFC's (at least when it comes to Perl 6's development).  I like
> those systems because they are a little more formalized than the
> fishbowl (I like that PEPs/RFC's have numbers), and seem not to get
> abandoned or lost as easily as Wiki pages tend to do (even with all
> the great organization work that's gone in to ZWiki and Zope.org's
> flavoring of ZWiki).

Maybe this is a key observation: that the PEP process works better
than the Fishbowl process because it is a little more formal.  A PEP
requires you to keep everything in one place and spend some time
editing it so that it's understandable for outsiders.  The PEP editor
enforces form standards, and keeps a centralized index, so you can
always find all PEPs.  PEPs also have categories, like proposal,
draft, standard, final, rejected, etc., which help.  Finally, PEPs
have a short name (the 1-4 digit PEP number) which makes references
easier and seems to be easier to remember than the typical Wiki name.

Wikis often wither on the vine: we recently had a semi-disaster in the
Python community with Wikis, where a Wiki was proposed and created for
communications regarding backporting of fixes to Python 2.2.2, and
then left mostly unused.  The few people who did use the Wiki found
their bugs being ignored; most people who backported bugs didn't
bother updating the Wiki.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)