Better organisation of reviews

I don't think extending the standard review time past 14 days is feasible for scheduling reasons. A proposal scheduled now for 14 days would miss the branch date for the Swift 5.4 Spring release, even if the proposal was universally accepted as-is and fully implemented. If you start lining up month-long reviews (+ expected re-reviews) for, say, the dependency chain of Swift Concurrency proposals you'll almost certainly push yourself past the next branch date. And longer review periods makes for more overlapping reviews, which means more things to track at once. We trade one problem for another.

I maintain that the primary issue is the surprise. Right now, it's plausible that a two-week holiday could completely straddle a review period and you wouldn't know until you saw that the review was done. If we schedule reviews in advance and it conflicts with your holiday, you can effectively time-shift: write your review in advance, decide to check in once to post it, etc.

For example, with the set of reviews that just launched, the proposals were effectively ready before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Had the Core Team posted the schedule before that holiday, there would be no surprise early this week, and folks with an interest could have chosen to read the proposals over the holiday (or not) as appropriate. Anyone who wanted to schedule a discussion with their colleagues would have been able to do so during the review period.

I checked in with the Core Team, and we're going to try to "pre-schedule" some of the Concurrency-related proposals to try to help here. These are the largest proposals going through the process in the near future, and there are several of them with dependencies. We're mindful that we need to start the review process, that some parts of Concurrency seem to be mostly settled while others are much more in flux, and that we have another holiday season coming up during which there will be no reviews. Here's what we're looking at:

  • Schedule async/await for December 8...22

  • Schedule "Objective-C Interoperability with Concurrency" for December 10...22

  • Schedule "Structured Concurrency" for January 5...19.

  • Schedule" Async Sequences" for January 5...19.

    Doug

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