Hi
Am 2025-09-04 00:07, schrieb Rob Landers:
I’m still trying to understand the problem this language is solving, can you help me out here? It is incredibly precise and detailed, but gets into over-specification, IMHO. Traditionally, PHP policy has leaned towards principle and illustrative examples over exact prescriptions. Is this intended to shift away from that approach?
The language is trying to solve ambiguity. The current phrasing of the policy is full of words like “maybe”, “might”, “should”, which leave room for interpretation. As I have mentioned in my reply to Thomas, a (formal) policy is intended to to allow cut discussion short in cases of disagreement by allowing someone to point towards the policy and say: “The policy we agreed on *clearly* specifies that X, but this rule was violated. I object with proceeding until this violation is resolved.”. It should not possible for the other side to “well actually it could also mean Y”, because they disagree. As an example the current policy states:
There'd be a minimum of 2 weeks between when an RFC that touches the language is brought up on this list and when it's voted on is required. Other RFCs might use a smaller timeframe, but it should be at least a week.
Specifically “Other RFCs” (i.e. RFCs that do not touch the language, which is not actually defined) “might” (this probably should read “may”) use a “smaller timeframe” that “should be at least a week” (i.e. it may also be 2 hours). In other words, that policy is completely useless to resolve any cases of disagreement, since it allows basically anything.
Further, how will this be enforced? Currently, if I understand correctly, this is generally enforced by the CoC and it doesn’t seem equipped to deal with "your vote ended 1 hour too early" type situations.
This is a good point that indeed should be written down in some way. I generally expect everyone to act in good faith, i.e. to only violate the policy by accident and to immediately remediate any issues once made aware of the mistake. Violations of the cooldown period should generally be recognized when pre-announcing the vote and the RFC author should then acknowledge the violation in a reply, wait a little more and then pre-announce the vote at a later point. Violations of the pre-announcement period should be recognized when starting the vote and the RFC author should then acknowledge the violation, cancel the vote and restart it after a new pre-announcement (with a new title to clear out any votes). The Wiki tracks the time of voting, so any votes cast after the voting period has ended would be ignored (which would only really matter in cases of close votes).
If the RFC author follows through with a vote, despite being in violation of the rules and being made aware of it, the result of the vote would be void. I'd say that if no one points out the violation after a “reasonable period of time” has passed, the violation is considered to not have occurred (i.e. it should not be possible to void a vote at day 13 of the voting period).
Best regards
Tim Düsterhus