Discussion: GAP `status` field

[magicmark]

CONTRIBUTING.md currently states the statuses as:

# GAPs are never "strawman". Later we'll probably add additional statuses. If in
# doubt, choose "proposal"
status: proposal | draft | accepted

PEP statuses prior art fwiw:

Status: <Draft | Active | Accepted | Provisional | Deferred | Rejected |
         Withdrawn | Final | Superseded>

We currently offer no guidance or definition for what it means for a GAP to be "accepted". Accepted by whom?

GAPs are explicitly community specs, and don't need to be "accepted" by anyone other than the initial sponsor and authors.

(The role of sponsor imo should be to check "does this GAP make sense, is it appropriate for this repo", and not "do I personally agree this is a good idea" -- and we should clarify this)

The statuses of a GAP could be considered implicitly as:

• "proposal" = GAP PR is still open
• "draft" = GAP PR has been merged with a DRAFT.md but no version directory has been created
• "accepted" = GAP PR has been merged and a version has been published.

Do we need an extra field?

To be clear, we could still display a "status" field in the frontmatter of the GAP document on the website or in deploy previews, but this can be calculated based on the above.

Proposal

(1) Remove status to avoid duplicate sources of truth to keep in sync.

(2) Add an additional optional withdrawn field in metadata.yml to encode the state of 'withdrawn' (i.e a GAPs has been withdrawn but without any superseding GAP).

 related:
  - <number>
 replaces: <number>
-supersededBy: <number>
+withdrawn:
+  # fields in `withdrawn` are mutually exclusive 
+  supersededBy: <number>
+  reason: <number>
 tags:
   - <string>

@benjie wdyt?

[benjie]

I’m treating GAPs like RFCs: merge early, merge often. I don’t think we should have lots of PRs open for ages, instead get them merged as proposal, once the champion thinks the community has found alignment they can advance it to draft, and finally once they are happy it’s complete change it to accepted. The GAP authors can determine this for themselves. The golden path is currently a proposal for example, but it’s still merged/published.

[martinbonnin]

Sorry I missed that one. I'm in favor of removing status as well. We have versioning. So versions are "accepted" and current state is "draft".

This is what we've been doing for Apollo specs and it's serving us well