Where is the DEP discussion?

Django Internals
1

Draft DEPs do not always have a related Forum discussion, and when they do, the posts are not named or linked consistently making them difficult to find.

DEP 0001 makes it very clear:

a draft DEP should be presented to the Django Forum.

Is this something that should be enforced more strongly?

I find the discussions on the Forum helpful and accessible. The Forum also has more community engagement than GitHub or Trac; a Forum post is crucial to giving the community a fair chance to weigh in. I think it would be good if all DEP Pull Requests had a related Forum post beginning with the DEP number. For example: DEP 1: DEP Purpose and Guidelines

The Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) process, for inspiration, is quite structured. Recent PEP 823 received a forum post, PEP 823: None-aware access operators and it is linked in the front matter of the PEP draft.

4 Likes
2

This seems easy enough to do and is generally a good thing to do for visibility.

Would you be willing to do the leg work for getting the existing DEPs up to date?

1 Like
3

Related OCWG Idea Issue: Increase visibility of DEP/WG/etc repo activity · Issue #24 · django/online-community-working-group · GitHub

I would love to see this happen in an automated fashion. Also perhaps a DEP sub category inside Django Internals?

1 Like
4

Get out of my mind. :grin:

1 Like
5

Certainly! Brainstorming what that would involve:

  • Open Pull Requests to accepted, finalized and rejected DEPs with any existing discussion on the Forum I can find.
  • Open Issues to draft DEPs that are missing discussion, asking the author to create and link a discussion.
  • Comment on DEPs still in Pull Request that are missing discussion, asking the author to create and link a discussion.

Anything I missed?

6

First step is probably opening a Pull Request to add Discussion-To to the DEP Metadata required fields.

2 Likes
7

This looks good.

I wonder if we could get some Github Actions setup to automate the creation of forum topics?

We could also perhaps auto create a Discord channel as well (this might become too noisy though)

8

I don’t see any harm in you creating the threads for them if you’re willing to do it. Maybe tag them on the post so they get notifications? I think that’d be more efficient and shouldn’t step on toes.

9

I like it!

I’ve begun by opening an issue in the DEPs repo, to get a bit of clarity on what I open my PR against.

As well as suggesting a DEP sub category in the OCWG repo.

1 Like