Was poking around following links from the new feature process page to the new feature GitHub repo and the below two excerpts were confusing for me at first read:
Django contributing docs section for How we make decisions:
Occasionally, discussions on feature ideas or the direction of Django may take place on the Django Forum. These discussions may include informal votes, which follow the voting style invented by Apache and used on Python itself, where votes are given as +1, +0, -0, or -1. Roughly translated, these votes mean:
- +1: “I love the idea and I’m strongly committed to it.”
- +0: “Sounds OK to me.”
- -0: “I’m not thrilled, but I won’t stand in the way.”
- -1: “I strongly disagree and would be very unhappy to see the idea turn into reality.”
Although these votes are informal, they’ll be taken very seriously. After a suitable voting period, if an obvious consensus arises we’ll follow the votes.
GitHub django/new-feature README:
Please avoid doing the following:
- Writing comments that are “+1” or “-1”. Use emojis to share those opinions, please.
After reading more carefully, they’re not contradictory: I missed the key phrase “may take place on the Django Forum” in the first excerpt.
Missing that one phrase though meant that I did a bit of a double take when I went directly from read the django docs explaining new features that included definitions for how django uses +1, -1, etc. to clicking through to the new feature repo where it explicitly said not to use the +1/-1 system that I just learned about in the django docs.
The mistake was on me for not thoroughly reading the first docs though, so I guess I’m not sure if it’d really be all that helpful to suggest anything be done since the docs are do include the information. My initial thought for a potential suggestion had been adding “The +1/-1 system is only used sparingly for informal voting in the Django Forum when it could be beneficial to discussions” to the bullet in second excerpt above.
Now that I’m on the topic and thinking about this more though, a related thought is why have two separate systems (they don’t look at face value that different to me)? Like, my thinking is don’t they map like this:
- +1: “I love the idea and I’m strongly committed to it.” /
: This feature seems like a straightforward and beneficial addition - +0: “Sounds OK to me.” /
: I support this feature and would use it - -0: “I’m not thrilled, but I won’t stand in the way.” /
: I have no strong opinion on this feature - -1: “I strongly disagree and would be very unhappy to see the idea turn into reality.” /
: I oppose this feature or believe it would cause issues for me or Django
Okay, actually trying to map them like I did above and reading the definitions side by side does seem to clarify the distinction: here’s an attempt #2 for mapping, which I think is more accurate to what is intended:
- = +1
- = [a nonexistent +0.5]
- = -0/+0 [lumped together]
- = -1
I already wrote it so I’ll keep the above thoughts here as is just in case it’s helpful / if anyone was curious about first impressions from someone who was reading this but is not even remotely as in the weeds as a lot of others in the community. I had to really stop and think about this for the distinction to be clear, and my first impression was that it looked a little bit like an overcomplication to have two systems saying basically the same thing.
To summarize more clearly: my initial impression was that it made sense to me logistically why we’d want to use emojis instead of text in github (so there’s auto-tallying), but it didn’t make sense to me why there was a distinction (as opposed to a mapping) between emoji vs +1/-1 system.
