Excerpts from Nick Coghlan's message of 2013-01-29 13:42:26 +1000:
One thing I noticed when starting work on Beaker is that a lot of the design rationale for major architectural decisions is hidden in email archives (including Red Hat internal ones), Bugzilla entries and code reviews on Gerrit.
To make it easier for new developers to understand past architectural changes/additions, to help users to understand changes coming in future releases, and to help us be confident that our proposed designs are solid, I'm suggesting we adopt a "Beaker Design Proposal" process for major changes (such as the scheduler updates I'm working on, the upcoming integrated dashboard, the "system pools" concept, self-service user groups and group jobs).
I am unashamedly stealing this concept from Python's PEP process, because I like it and I think it works pretty well in ensuring that the *rationale* for a design is captured in addition to forcing us to think a bit more about the design itself before diving into code. As with Python, only major changes would need to be written up as a design proposal - bug fixes and smaller features would be handled through Bugzilla as usual. In recent times, the integration with oVirt Engine in 0.10 is probably the only change big enough to qualify (although the Supported Query idea might have been worth writing up as well).
+1 to this idea generally.
In the Eng Ops days we were supposed to do a "Software Design Document" before every major enhancement, which seems like basically the same thing, though in reality we never got around to writing them.
In terms of mechanics, I'd largely follow the Python model for numbering: reserve BDP 1 for the meta-proposal describing the process, BDP 2-99 for any other meta-proposals we come up with, and start the actual design proposals at BDP 100.
Publication would be via Sphinx on beaker-project.org: the design proposals would just live in another docs directory alongside the existing User and Admin guides.
These seem like "meta-documentation" so I think they should be outside beaker's git. Not sure if that's what you intended.
BDP approval rights would rest with the Beaker Development Lead (i.e. currently me) or their delegate (similar to the way PEP approval rights ultimately rest with Guido van Rossum as Python's BDFL, but one of the other senior core developers may take on the role of BDFL-delegate for a particular PEP).
Not sure if we need such a heavyweight "approval" process, ultimately if there is code and it gets merged then it is "approved". It may be more realistic to look on these as documentation rather than proposals (and perhaps even just call them Beaker Design Documents?), acknowledging that we won't always get around to writing one before we write the code.