We really need a protocol for proposing enhancements. I wanted to wait until I had time to create some custom thing that would capture discussion but this just made the perfect an enemy of the good:
- The edit-ability of the wiki makes it difficult for others to track down accurate standards and propose changes formally, with proposals and actual standards getting mixed up.
- Authors attempting to create a reference for a specific proposal generally turn to a combination of forum, wiki, or blog posts. While this might be useful for initially developing an idea, it's hard for others to propose changes and for those changes to get incorporated into the proposal.
Sorry, we can't call it a NIP:
Structure & FormatUrban Dictionary wrote:A Japanese person (derogatory, from Nippon, the Japanese word for Japan)
#1 with >1,000 votes
Bitcoin uses a bip repo with a simple directory structure consisting of a "readme.md" that manually links to each BIP file "bip-000#.mediawiki". BIPS store images and other accompanying files store in subdirectories named after the BIP "./bip-000#/image.png", but the file itself is always stored in the root directory.
BIP are stored in the Mediawiki format, a product of their legacy wiki. I propose that we instead use markdown directly. For more complex formatting, we could switch to Gollum, Gihub's wiki system that can be stored in the repo while still being accessible and editable through GitHub's wiki interface. However, unless Ademan or someone else is else wants to take on setting this up, let's start with basic markdown files and iterate from there.
Appending the title after the the numbering would be helpful: "nep-0002-d", "nep-0003-id", "nep-0004-name-ops".
Versioning
BIPS are numbered using an integer system. Withdrawn and replaced BIPs simply label the older BIP as withdrawn and add a new BIP.
UPDATE: I believe that since we have standards that naturally go through multiple revisions (namespaces, for example) we should adopt a versioning scheme. This would consist of adding a single line to the "header" of the document.
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BIP: 10
Title: Multi-Sig Transaction Distribution
Status: Draft
Type: Informational
Created: 2011-10-28
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NEP: 2
Title: domain name namespace d/
Version: 2.0
Status: Adopted
Type: namespace specification
Created: 2011-10-28
Process
BIP-0001 lays out the types of BIPS, formatting, and a workflow. We can largely copy it, making adjustments for Markdown formatting.
Their workflow is essentially:
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community vetting -> submit draft (dev mailing list) -> submit to BIP editor (email)
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community vetting -> submit draft (NEP forum area) -> PR
The NEP should link to a forum thread for discussion with the OP consisting of the NEP. When to create a new thread (vs updating the OP to match a new draft) should be left to the author. Older draft threads should probably be listed in the subsection of the "see also" section.