Lassi Kortela
Living document
This document defines the current Scheme Review process. It is expected to change indefinitely as the process changes.
Scheme Review was started as a response to the success and shortcomings of the SRFI (Scheme Requests for Implementation) process. SRFI is over 20 years old so a lot of evidence has been accumulated.
What has worked well with SRFI:
Everything is public. Transparency builds trust.
Drafts are announced. Keeps regulars active.
Separation between authors and reviewers. Provides a good balance between authorial control and accountability to the community.
What has caused trouble:
Tight focus on “Requests for Implementation” coupled with the fact that anyone can send new proposals has resulted in a flow of experimental work that has not had time to mature.
Many interesting proposals are either fit into the process like square pegs into a round hole (with sub-par results), or left outside the process (devoid of the attention they deserve).
Tight deadlines commonly fly by. (90 days is not a lot.)
[Meant to reflect the current state of things. Not meant to be finalized.]
Each proposal has one or more authors.
The proposal starts when the authors submit a first draft.
The proposal is submitted as a git repo. (Currently hosted at
gitea.scheme.org/review.)
The authors are free to send any number of additional drafts.
The authors are free to add more co-authors for later drafts.
Each proposal is uniquely identified by an ID of the form
YYYY-N where:
YYYY is the four-digit year when the first draft was
received, and
N is a running number covering all proposals started
in the same year.
The running number starts from 1 since there are some
problems with SRFI numbers starting from zero. (Hard to remember that
SRFI 0 exits; programs cannot use 0 to mean “none”.)
The running numbers are monotonically increasing within a given year, but it’s permissible for there to be gaps in the numbering.
It is expected that many proposals take more than a year to finish. No matter how many years it takes, the proposal is still identified by the year when the first draft was sent.