Issues

• Our own directives?

  RESOLVED: Not yet.

• Should we use urn-5 instead of serial numbers to avoid collisions? This could be a nice application.

  RESOLVED: Not. Not human-readable enough. Collisions are resolved by using the names described below instead of serial numbers.

• What should we say about the issues section?

  RESOLVED: The issues section should contain all the uncertain points of the specification; there should not be questions at any other point. Once an issue is resolved, the resolution and its rationale should be here.

  Issues should be clear questions which need answers. "I'm not sure about X." would be much better phrased as "Should we do X?". That way there is a clear question, to which we are seeking a simple answer.

  Resolutions of issues should always contain reasoning behind them:

  - should we do X?
  
      RESOLVED: No
  

  is not good. Should be:

  - should we do X?
  
      RESOLVED: No, since that would interfere with Y.
  

  Even

  - should we do X?
  
      RESOLVED: No, not yet
  

  is much better, since it at least gives more information.

• Do we need the Scope and Type fields?

Process

Anyone may start a new PEG in the Incomplete state (becoming one of the PEG's authors). The authors have control over the contents of the PEG. In addition, anyone may enter new issues to a PEG.

When the PEG seems ready for review, it should be made Current and posted to gzz-dev. At this point, the PEG may still be edited in response to comments from the list.

As long as the PEG is in Incomplete or Current state, the author may change its status to Current, Incomplete (for revision), or Irrelevant (e.g., other PEGs superceded the current one).

NOTE: PEGs should not be made Current as long as there are unresolved issues. If the responses from the list raise issues that cannot be immediately resolved, the PEG should be put into Incomplete state again.

At some point after this, the architect (tjl) will make a decision to either accept, force revision, declare rejected, or declare irrelevant. No-one else may change the status of the PEGs to Accepted or Rejected.

If the PEG was accepted, rejected or declared irrelevant, it may not be edited any more, except for the architect or author declaring it implemented or partly implemented.

A PEG int the Revising state is editable by the authors, similarly to an incomplete PEG.

Names

The PEGs are not numbered but named, with names such as:

move_vobs--benja
move_vobs_2--benja
meta_new_fields--tjl

These names are used for the directory names.

Inside the directory, there should be one reStructuredText file, called peg.rst and any number of other files (images, example code ...).

Overall structure

The PEG should begin with the header and after that, a short introduction which should briefly answer the questions what and why (and, if not obvious, how).

After this section, there should be an Issues section (following the example of OpenGL extension specs), which should contain the open questions related to this PEG. Once an issue is resolved, it is often good to leave the resolution and the rationale behind the resolution into the Issues section

Then, there can be free-form sections in which the changes proposed are detailed.

Header

The Header of the PEG should contain the following fields:

Authors

Comma-separated list of author names or handles

Date

The date the PEG was created (or submitted)

Last-Modified

CVS date tag

Revision

CVS revision tag

Status

The PEG status

and may optionally also contain the following fields:

Stakeholders

Comma-separated list of stakeholder names or handles

Scope

How large the effects of this PEG are:

Major

Most code needs a touchup

Minor

limited

Trivial

few places need to be changed in a trivial way

Cosmetic

name changes and the like

Type

The type of the PEG

META

PEG about PEGs

Policy

Setting goals, overall ideas; e.g. styled_text--benja

Architecture

Architectural changes; e.g. 1005

Feature

A new feature; e.g. vobcoorder_isactive--tjl

Interface

An adjustment of one or more interfaces; e.g. 1017

Implementation

An adjustment of how an implementation does something

Affects-PEGs

A comma-separated list of the PEGs that this PEG affects: since accepted PEGs may not be modified, this field explains which PEGs define behaviour that is to be modified by this PEG.

The idea is that the reST compiler would take this into account and mention the affecting PEGs in a compiled PEG.

Low-level Format

PEGs use the python reStructuredText markup language.

Sentences should not begin with either PEG names, variable names or anything like that. So:

``miniblocks--benja`` showed how ...

should be replaced with

The PEG ``miniblocks--benja`` showed how

Or at the very least

In miniblocks--benja it was shown how