Link Godot Ideas repository as an alternative for GIP

[Xrayez]

Resolves #39.
Resolves #47.
Closes #91, as suggested by @Calinou in #91 (comment).
Closes #779, similar suggestion by @aaronfranke in #779 (comment), with the 👍 from the OP.

Currently, GIP has a requirement that proposals must describe a concrete use case to justify making a proposal:

All proposals must be linked to a substantive use-case. In justifying your proposal, it is not enough to say it would be "nice" or "helpful". Use the template to show how Godot is not currently meeting your needs and then explain how your proposal will meet a particular need.

This pull request amends the third rule for submitting a proposal to provide an alternative way to present and discuss ideas in the Godot Ideas repository (unofficial) in case people do not have any concrete use cases to justify the proposal.

[aaronfranke]

@Xrayez Perhaps this should be a sub-point? The syntax looks like this:

1. One
    * Sub-point of One
2. Two
    * Sub-point of Two

[Xrayez]

Yes, this improves visibility/readability indeed. 🙂

[Xrayez]

As kindly pointed out by Calinou in #1634 (comment), I've stumbled upon "Before creating an RFC" section in the Rust's RFC repository. I'll quote the entire thing for the purpose of recording this, and put some emphasis with bold:

A hastily-proposed RFC can hurt its chances of acceptance. Low quality proposals, proposals for previously-rejected features, or those that don't fit into the near-term roadmap, may be quickly rejected, which can be demotivating for the unprepared contributor. Laying some groundwork ahead of the RFC can make the process smoother.

Although there is no single way to prepare for submitting an RFC, it is generally a good idea to pursue feedback from other project developers beforehand, to ascertain that the RFC may be desirable; having a consistent impact on the project requires concerted effort toward consensus-building.

The most common preparations for writing and submitting an RFC include talking the idea over on our official Discord server, discussing the topic on our developer discussion forum, and occasionally posting "pre-RFCs" on the developer forum. You may file issues on this repo for discussion, but these are not actively looked at by the teams.

As a rule of thumb, receiving encouraging feedback from long-standing project developers, and particularly members of the relevant sub-team is a good indication that the RFC is worth pursuing.

That's one of the functions behind the proposed Godot Ideas repository, to give people ability to pre-evaluate whether their ideas are worth pursuing for the engine development. If not, then those ideas are certainly plugin candidates, and that's where GIP is not suitable for those kind of proposals, am I right?

Godot Ideas is not any different from other Godot Engine community channels. I just don't see any other solution. There are definitely other alternatives from the GIP side:

1. Allow people to create non-proposal, discussion issues. Those don't have to be evaluated by the core developers.
2. Amend some GIP rules to be less restricting. But as Godot keeps growing, I suspect that we'll get even more strict rules for submitting proposals, just like with the Rust's RFC above.

So, is there a reason why this PR has not been merged yet? 😛

[Xrayez]

@akien-mga @clayjohn sorry for disturbing, but I'd like to receive your feedback on this (even negative), or at least say that you're aware of this and will look into this later, it's been almost 3 months since I created this PR.

Thanks!

[Xrayez]

We have enabled GitHub's "Discussions" feature in Godot Ideas repository: https://github.com/godot-extended-libraries/godot-ideas/discussions, so perhaps that's something Godot Proposals can enable as well, I believe this would solve most of our inquiries.

This way, there's no need to open or close issues, and those discussions don't have to be evaluated by the core developers (talking about meeting realistic expectations).

[Xrayez]

I've created another meta proposal #2069 which might as well supersede this pull request, which would also pretty much solve most of the issues we've been discussing throughout the past year...

[Xrayez]

What's the status of this PR? Is it safe to merge?

[clayjohn]

I think Calinou and AaronFranke should review again since there have been a few force pushes since they initially approved.

[Xrayez]

The only reason why I had to force-push was to resolve merge conflicts, as usual!

[Xrayez]

I'm sorry but do we have consensus or not? It's been 2 months from our last interaction. Lets just merge this and see how it goes? I won't bother anyone ever again regarding the proposal process if someone merges this PR.

[clayjohn]

Merging now.

As a heads up, there has been a lot of discussion again about using Github discussions (as you originally proposed I believe). If we do end up moving to discussions, then this PR will likely need to be reverted.

Edit: for future reference the discussion was on April 23, 2021 in the #devel channel on rocketchat

[Xrayez]

If we do end up moving to discussions, then this PR will likely need to be reverted.

Yeah, that's a fair decision, thanks!