Time for a request-for-comments process?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Guix!

The recent ‘guix shell’ addition is almost anecdotal technically yet
important for the project because users interact with Guix primarily
through the CLI.  Adding a new command is a commitment (our users must
trust it won’t change overnight), and getting the details wrong could
make us fail to honor that commitment.

For ‘guix shell’ I left time for comments and repeatedly asked people to
comment; yet pushing it was a bit stressful: Did I make a mistake?  Did
everyone with a stake in this really have a chance to comment?

That makes me think it’s perhaps time for a formalized
request-for-comments (RFC) kind of process for such “major changes”.  We
could draw inspiration from one of the many existing processes: Python’s
PEPs, Scheme’s SRFIs, Nix’s RFCs, Rust’s MCPs, etc.  I think a major
goal of the process would be to formalize a minimum and a maximum
duration under which an RFC is under evaluation, and a mechanism to
determine whether it’s accepted or withdrawn.

Thoughts?  Anyone with experience with such a process?

Ludo’.