DEP Purpose and Guidelines

DEP Number:	1
Type:	Process
Author:	Carl Gay
Status:	Active
Created:	07-Jan-2012
Last-Modified:	16-Jan-2012
Post-History:	16-Jan-2012, 10-Jan-2012

Preamble

This document is based heavily on Python PEP 1, “PEP Purpose and Guidelines”, by Barry Warsaw, Jeremy Hylton, and David Goodger. The author would like to thank them for providing an excellent base for the Dylan team to work from.

Terminology

Dylan Reference Manual (DRM)

The manual written by Andrew Shalit, plus its errata.

Dylan language specification

The DRM plus all Accepted DEPs that modify the Dylan language specification.

Open Dylan (OD)

The reference implementation of the Dylan language specification.

Standard libraries

The set of libraries that are officially maintained alongside Open Dylan. They are officially maintained in the following sense:

• Commits are reviewed for bugs and style.

• They are tested prior to each OD release.

• They are packaged with each OD release.

What is a DEP?

DEP stands for Dylan Enhancement Proposal. A DEP is a design document which

• provides information to the Dylan community, or

• describes a new feature for the Dylan language or its standard libraries, or

• describes changes to the processes or environment surrounding the Dylan language or Open Dylan.

The DEP should provide a concise technical specification of, and rationale for, the feature or process.

We intend DEPs to be the primary mechanism for proposing new features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for documenting the design decisions that have gone into Dylan. The DEP author is responsible for building consensus within the community and documenting dissenting opinions.

Because the DEPs are maintained as text files in a versioned repository, their revision history is the historical record of the feature proposal [1].

DEP Types

There are three kinds of DEP:

1. A Standards Track DEP describes a new feature or implementation for Dylan or its standard libraries.

2. An Informational DEP describes a Dylan design issue, or provides general guidelines or information to the Dylan community, but does not propose a new feature. Informational DEPs do not necessarily represent a Dylan community consensus or recommendation, so users and implementors are free to ignore Informational DEPs or follow their advice.

3. A Process DEP describes a process surrounding Dylan, or proposes a change to (or an event in) a process. Process DEPs are like Standards Track DEPs but apply to areas other than the Dylan language itself. They may propose an implementation, but not to Dylan’s codebase; they often require community consensus; unlike Informational DEPs, they are more than recommendations, and users are typically not free to ignore them. Examples include procedures, guidelines, changes to the decision-making process, and changes to the tools or environment used in Dylan development. Any meta-DEP is also considered a Process DEP.

DEP Work Flow

Have an idea – The DEP process begins with a new idea for Dylan. It is highly recommended that a single DEP contain a single key proposal or new idea. Small enhancements or patches often don’t need a DEP and can be injected into the Dylan development work flow with a pull request to the issue tracker for the appropriate repository on GitHub. The more focused the DEP, the more successful it tends to be. If in doubt, split your DEP into several well-focused ones.

Have an author – Each DEP must have an author – someone who writes the DEP using the style and format described below, shepherds the discussions in the appropriate forums, and attempts to build community consensus around the idea. The DEP author should first attempt to ascertain whether the idea is DEP-able. Posting to dylan-lang@googlegroups.com is the best way to go about this.

Vet the idea publicly – Vetting an idea publicly before going as far as writing a DEP is meant to save the potential author time. Many ideas have been brought forward for changing Dylan that have been rejected for various reasons. Asking the Dylan community first if an idea is original helps prevent too much time being spent on something that is guaranteed to be rejected based on prior discussions (searching the internet does not always do the trick). It also helps to make sure the idea is applicable to the entire community and not just the author. Just because an idea sounds good to the author does not mean it will work for most people in most areas where Dylan is used.

Present a draft – Once the author has asked the Dylan community whether an idea has any chance of acceptance, a properly formatted draft DEP should be presented to dylan-lang@googlegroups.com. The initial DEP status should be Draft. The DEP author should assign the next available DEP number to the DEP by looking at the DEP directory to find the highest used number. The DEP number is not assured until the DEP has been committed to the origin Git repository. As updates are necessary, the DEP author may commit new versions.

Wait for at least ten days to receive feedback on each draft.

Reach consensus – We rely on reaching consensus on the dylan-lang@googlegroups.com mailing list. Consensus must be reached for the DEP to be approved. Exactly what “consensus” means here is left undefined, as we expect most cases to be obvious and we wish to keep the process informal for now. At such time as this becomes a problem we may implement a more formal scheme (e.g., voting).

Standards Track DEPs consist of two parts, a design document and a reference implementation. The DEP should be reviewed and accepted before a reference implementation is begun, unless a reference implementation will aid people in studying the DEP. Standards Track DEPs must include an implementation – in the form of a Git branch URL – before it can be considered Final.

DEP authors are responsible for collecting community feedback on a DEP before submitting it for review. However, wherever possible, long open-ended discussions on public mailing lists should be avoided. Strategies to keep the discussions efficient include: setting up a separate mailing list for the topic, having the DEP author accept private comments in the early design phases, setting up a wiki page, etc. DEP authors should use their discretion here.

For a DEP to be Accepted it must meet certain minimum criteria. It must be a clear and complete description of the proposed enhancement. The enhancement must represent a net improvement. The proposed implementation, if applicable, must be solid and must not unduly add complication.

Once a DEP has been accepted, the reference implementation must be completed. When the reference implementation is complete and accepted by the community, the status may be changed to Final.

A DEP can also be assigned status Deferred. The DEP author or editor can assign the DEP this status when no progress is being made on the DEP. Once a DEP is deferred, the DEP editor can re-assign it to draft status.

A DEP can also be Rejected. Perhaps after all is said and done it was not a good idea. It is still important to have a record of this fact.

DEPs can also be Superseded-By a different DEP, rendering the original obsolete. This is intended for Informational DEPs, where version 2 of an API can replace version 1.

The possible paths of the status of DEPs are as follows:

Some Informational and Process DEPs may also have a status of Active if they are never meant to be completed. E.g. DEP 1 (this DEP).

What belongs in a successful DEP?

Each DEP should have the following parts:

1. Title

2. Preamble – RFC 822 style headers containing meta-data about the DEP, including the DEP number, a short descriptive title (limited to a maximum of 44 characters), the names, and optionally the contact info for each author, etc.

3. Abstract – a short (~200 word) description of the technical issue being addressed.

4. Copyright/public domain – Each DEP must either be explicitly labelled as placed in the public domain (see this DEP as an example) or licensed under the Open Publication License.

5. Specification – The technical specification should describe the syntax and semantics of any new language or library feature. The specification should be detailed enough to allow competing, interoperable Dylan implementations. If the DEP proposes changes to the language itself it must clearly indicate all such changes.

6. Motivation – The motivation is critical for DEPs that want to change the Dylan language. It should clearly explain why the existing language specification is inadequate to address the problem that the DEP solves.

7. Rationale – The rationale fleshes out the specification by describing what motivated the design and why particular design decisions were made. It should describe alternate designs that were considered and related work, e.g. how the feature is supported in other languages.

   The rationale should provide evidence of consensus within the community and discuss important objections or concerns raised during discussion.

8. Backwards Compatibility – All DEPs that introduce backwards incompatibilities must include a section describing these incompatibilities and their severity. The DEP must explain how the author proposes to deal with these incompatibilities.

9. Reference Implementation – The reference implementation must be completed before any DEP is given status “Final”, but it need not be completed before the DEP is accepted. It is better to finish the specification and rationale first and reach consensus on it before writing code.

   The final implementation must include good test code and documentation.

DEP Format and Templates

DEPs must be written in ReStructuredText format. This allows for rich markup that is still quite easy to read, but results in much better-looking and more functional HTML.

The DEP author must verify that the ReStructuredText parses correctly. For example:

git clone git@github.com:dylan-lang/website.git
cd website
cp your-dep.rst source/proposals/dep-1234.rst
make html

Fix any errors that are displayed.

DEP Header Preamble

Each DEP must begin with a title, followed by an RFC 822 style header preamble in simple RST table format. The headers must appear in the following order. Headers marked with “*” are optional and are described below. All other headers are required. All dates must be in dd-mmm-yyyy format (e.g., 14-Jan-2012). A list of values must use a comma as separator.

  DEP-Number: <DEP number>
  Author: <list of authors' real names and optionally, email addresses>
  Status: <Draft | Active | Accepted | Deferred | Rejected |
           Withdrawn | Final | Superseded>
  Type: <Standards Track | Informational | Process>
  Affects-DRM: <Yes | No>
  Created: <date created>
  Last-Modified: <date last modified>
  Post-History: <date(s) of postings to hackers list>
* Resolution: <url>
* Target-Version: <OD version number>
* Requires: <DEP number(s)>
* Replaces: <DEP number(s)>
* Superseded-By: <DEP number>

DEP Number

Authors may assign DEP numbers themselves by looking at the last number in the numerical list of DEPs and incrementing it by one. To prevent collisions, the author should set the DEP-Number header to “Unassigned” until just before the DEP is committed to git.

Author

The Author header lists the names, and optionally the email addresses of all the authors/owners of the DEP. The format of the Author header value must be

Random J. User <address@dom.ain>

if the email address is included, and just

Random J. User

if the address is not given.

If there are multiple authors, each should be on a separate line following RFC 2822 continuation line conventions.

Status

See DEP Work Flow for a description of this field.

Type

The Type header specifies the type of DEP: Standards Track, Informational, or Process.

Affects-DRM

This field is only required for Standards Track DEPs. The value should be Yes if the DEP proposes a change to the Dylan language definition, and otherwise No. The language definition is composed of the Dylan Reference Manual plus any Accepted DEPs for which this field is Yes. If this field is set to Yes then the DEP must clearly list exactly how it affects the language definition.

Created

The Created header records the date that the DEP was assigned a number.

Last-Modified

The Last-Modified header is included because it may be useful to those reading DEPs without access to git. It should be updated when substantive changes are made to the DEP. It need not be updated when fixing typos, changed URLs, etc.

Post-History

This field should list the dates when DEP drafts were posted to the hackers mailing list. List the dates from newest to oldest.

Resolution

The Resolution header is required for Standards Track DEPs only. It contains a URL that should point to an email message or other web resource where the pronouncement about the DEP is made.

Target-Version

Standards Track DEPs must have a Target-Version header which indicates the version of Open Dylan in which the feature will be released. Informational and Process DEPs do not need a Target-Version header.

Requires

DEPs may have a Requires header, indicating the DEP numbers that this DEP depends on.

Superseded-By and Replaces

DEPs may also have a Superseded-By header indicating that they have been rendered obsolete by a later document; the value is the number of the DEP that replaces the current document. The newer DEP must have a Replaces header containing the number of the DEP that it rendered obsolete.

Auxiliary Files

DEPs may include auxiliary files such as diagrams. Such files must be named dep-XXXX-aaaa.ext, where “XXXX” is the DEP number (padded with leading zeros), “aaaa” is arbitrary text to indicate the file content (e.g., “state-diagram”), and “ext” is replaced by the actual file extension (e.g. “png”).

Reporting DEP Bugs, or Submitting DEP Updates

How you report a bug, or submit a DEP update depends on several factors, such as the maturity of the DEP, the preferences of the DEP author, and the nature of your comments. For the early draft stages of the DEP, it’s probably best to send your comments and changes directly to the DEP author. For more mature, or finished DEPs you may want to submit corrections to the Dylan issue tracker [2] so that your changes don’t get lost. Assign the bug/patch to the DEP author.

When in doubt about where to send your changes, please check first with the DEP author.

DEP authors who are also Dylan committers can update the DEPs themselves committing them to Git and pushing to the main repository.

DEP Author Responsibilities & Workflow

A DEP author must subscribe to the <dylan-lang@googlegroups.com> list. Before submitting a (new revision of a DEP) the author must do the following:

• Read the DEP to check if it is ready, sound, and complete. The ideas must make technical sense, even if they don’t seem likely to be accepted.

• The title should accurately describe the content.

• Edit the DEP for language (spelling, grammar, sentence structure, etc.), markup, and code style.

Once the DEP is ready for the repository, the DEP author will:

• Assign the next available DEP number.

• List the DEP in the DEP index (in two places: the categorized list, and the numeric list).

• Add the DEP to Git. All DEPs live in the website repository. The command to check it out is:

  git clone https://github.com/dylan-lang/website
  

  Commit your changes, push them to your fork of the repository and submit a pull request.

• Monitor opendylan.org to make sure the DEP gets added to the site properly.

Resources:

• See the section For Open Dylan Developers on the opendylan.org documentation page.

References and Footnotes

[1]

This historical record is available by the normal Git commands for retrieving older revisions. For those without direct access to Git, you can browse the current and past DEP revisions here: https://github.com/dylan-lang/website/tree/master/source/proposals

[2]

Which issue tracker to use will depend on the content of the DEP. For language changes, changes to Open Dylan, or changes to “core” libraries it will usually be opendylan. For other libraries there may be a separate repository and issue tracker. This is still in flux. When in doubt, ask in IRC on the #dylan channel or on the hackers list.

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.