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PEP 308: Helping Aahz to set up the ballot.

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Wed Feb 19 23:21:46 EST 2003 
Damien Morton wrote:

> Would reducing the abllot from 15 to 10 items make that much
> difference?
> 
> I happen to think the division into groups rather arbritary.

Well it's arbitrary only in that I can't prove it and won't testify to
it :-).  The dividing line (in this case between groups II and III) is
one of seeing at least some independent support for an idea vs. seeing
none (either no comment, or just negative comments).

> Why not put all the options to the community and see how it goes.

It's a fair question.  One issue might be that too _many_ choices might
divide the pro-PEP camp in an unnecessarily artificial way if the voting
process were too simple (e.g., "Pick your one favorite form").

I think the current thinking (or last thinking at the time it was
mentioned) probably doesn't make this a big issue, since each form was
in essence being voted on separately (with positive, neutral, and
negative votes possible), so it doesn't really matter.

But there really is not much point in including _every_ possible form
which _ever_ got mentioned on the ballot.  Look, here's another proposal
I just made up:  `C hurgle x durgle y'.  That's obviously dumb, but it's
a proposal!  Should that be on the ballot?  (The answer, of course, is
no.)

It doesn't make much sense to me to include proposals in the actual
ballot that no one (except the original proponent) ever expressed any
public interest in.  With a good voting process, if that happens, it
wouldn't hurt much.  But it really is just extra noise.

As for the group II proposals (those that are not mentioned in the PEP,
but were proposed at some point and received some token support), I
leave it up to the general voters to decide whether those should be on
the ballot; I don't have any strong feelings either way.  Certainly as
the PEP stands, there is a diverse enough selection that really covers
all the different _kinds_ of proposals (an idea that someone else in
this thread was getting at).  If the PEP "passes," and there are one or
two forms that are clearly at the lead when all is said and done, we can
leave it up to Guido to settle on a form that's best for Python (which
we'll ultimately be doing, anyway, of course).

-- 
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