Do we have a RFC *process* for the core Racket language(s)? Do we need one?

General
1

Do we have a community-led RFC process for the core Racket language(s)? Do we need one?

I'll give an example where a community-led RFC process may be valuable:

I've noticed the issue below has bitten another experienced racketeer - and not for the first time by the sounds of it.:

by default read-line leaves the \r character at the end of a line entered on the command line on Windows

There has been multiple suggestions to mitigate this issue including improving the documentation, changing the default, and even using resyntax to identify occurrences and make recommendations.

The elephant in the room is backwards compatibility, a responsibility to both to the users and maintainers of large corpus of applications and libraries written in Racket languages (who quite reasonably like to avoid changing working code that has been tested and is in use) as well as the smaller, but not insignificant issue of books and other texts that are written for Racket languages.

Other languages have evolved over time, and some have community-led RFC processes. Is it time for Racket to do the same?

Best regards,

Stephen

Edit: I should add that by core Racket language(s) I mean the ones included in the Racket Distribution.

2 Likes
2

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: By default read-line leaves the \r character at the end of a line entered on the command line on Windows

4

We lost the reply (possibly an email client bug: has happened to me before)

5

OTOH, I think the technical discussion belongs elsewhere: Stephen's OP was specifically about RFCs, with this issue just one example.

1 Like
6

Yes.

I also believe that this is something that the community should take ownership of.

I don't believe the management team have the bandwidth to do this for us, and I don't think it is right to ask them.

While I do expect the management team to have veto powers in their capacity as guardians of the Racket project, I don't expect they will need to use them with a well defined community-RFC process.

Stephen

7

technical discussion moved to

:beetle:

8

This has been brought up a few times, and I do think an RFC process would be valuable. We have such a process in place for the Rhombus project (examples), and I feel the process we settled on is lightweight and effective. I'd gladly help design something like it for the needs of Racket, if there is broad interest and support.

3 Likes