Dear Chris, 

Thanks for humoring me and working through this in the main repository issue. I 
commented back inline in my PR between branches in my personal fork of the 
repository, but will leave a note here as well.

**Why issues for discussion and PRs for syntax review?** Partly because 
@JonathanGregory requested that:

> A given proposal should be discussed as one issue. It shouldn't fork or be 
> superseded by another one, unless that reflects what has happened to the 
> proposal, in the same way that we continue discussion under one trac ticket 
> for a given proposal. This is so that it's easy to trace the discussion which 
> led to a given agreed proposal.

And because I totally agree. A proposal should be described as a problem or 
deficiency in the current spec (an issue). Then the solution planned and 
discussed among the community as one conversation that is traceable in one 
place. I think the issue interface is very well suited to this for it's 
markdown capabilities and integration with email notifications, among other 
things. The ability to link an issue to a commit and/or PR that resolves it is 
a very nice way to trace the connection between a problem, discussion of the 
fix, and the actual implementation of the fix. 

**Why a PR over in my personal fork and not here?** Two reasons, 1) so people 
can opt into the early line by line review / not inundate the cf email list 
with PR review spam and 2) to demonstrate what the interface is like without 
implying that we use it whole-hog. Per Jonathan and my observations, the PR 
interface is really not suited to commenting on sentences and paragraphs of 
text. It breaks the text apart and can quickly get out of hand. Look at how 
commenting works in google docs and word, that is much better suited to editing 
written word.

I hope that in the future, we have a nice interface for diffing, commenting, 
and evolving text for this kind of application, but right now we just don't. So 
we need to kick out to google docs or fork repositories in small groups to 
evolve the text of major contributions and look to the future for better 
solutions.

---
Rereading your and my comments, I think we are largely in agreement. I have a 
few minor changes I'll check into my fork in a moment. Maybe you could take my 
["CONTRIBUTING"](https://github.com/dblodgett-usgs/cf-conventions/tree/CONTRIBUTING)
 branch and evolve the text to better convey the imperfect but pragmatic 
position we find ourselves in?

Best, 

- Dave

-- 
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/issues/130#issuecomment-390829102

Reply via email to