PEP: 10 Title: Voting Guidelines Author: Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org>
Status: Active Type: Process Content-Type: text/x-rst Created:
07-Mar-2002 Post-History: 07-Mar-2002

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

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.

[1] Python Developer's Guide, (http://www.python.org/dev/)

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