PEP: 10
Title: Voting Guidelines
Version: $Revision: 1687 $
Last-Modified: $Date: 2003-09-21 21:51:50 -0700 (Sun, 21 Sep 2003) $
Author: Barry A. Warsaw <barry at python.org>
Status: Active
Type: Informational
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

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

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


Copyright

    This document has been placed in the public domain.