PEP 484: Change the consent requirement to be informational

[JelleZijlstra]

Following discussion on the typing-sig mailing list. cc @srittau @gvanrossum

[JelleZijlstra]

I'm not wedded to the exact wording here; alternative suggestions are welcome.

[gvanrossum]

I'm personally in favor, and I recommend that the SC approve this change. There's an SC meeting this afternoon and this is on the agenda (I have to miss the meeting myself, but Brett will be attending).

[srittau]

I was not aware that this was in PEP 484. Would it make more sense to remove this sentence from the PEP completely and let the typeshed project handle it. This gives us more flexibility for a policy change in the future. I am not aware of the history of this sentence and its background, though.

Edit: I just caught up with the typing-sig thread, and the answers are contained in there. I am fine with the new wording.

[brettcannon]

I agree with @srittau that the sentence should just be removed and let typeshed handle any decision as to whether the owner is notified (the currently wording makes it a requirements instead of a suggestion, which would mean providing type hints to an orphaned project could not happen if the owner couldn't be reached).

[JelleZijlstra]

I removed the problematic sentence now and reworded the next sentence to reflect reality (in particular, I don't think we have decided on typeshed policies in the python-dev mailing list any time in the last few years).

[gvanrossum]

OK, I can get behind this, sounds like Brett agrees too, so we'd only need one more person on the SC to agree.

[brettcannon]

OK, steering council meeting just discussed this and the decision was to tweak the sentence to make type stubs an opt-out situation and not opt-in. So if a project wants to have their type stubs removed then typeshed is obliged to remove those stubs. Sorry to change this again, @JelleZijlstra , but that sentence change had unanimous support.

[gvanrossum]

@brettcannon Can you provide Jelle with the exact sentence that the SC endorsed?

[brettcannon]

@gvanrossum there wasn't an exact sentence, just to make opt-out possible.

@JelleZijlstra a suggestion from @ncoghlan was:
"Note that stubs for a given package will not be included here if the package owners have specifically requested that they be omitted."

[gvanrossum]

Also once this is merged, the README (or something else?) in typeshed ought to be updated to reflect the change in policy.

[gvanrossum]

With this change, I approve.

[JelleZijlstra]

Thanks for making the change @gvanrossum, sorry I let this drop for a little while.

[gvanrossum]

At this point it's up to @brettcannon to approve and merge.

[brettcannon]

LGTM and seems to align with what was asked for in the steering council meeting, so I've merged it!