swift-syntax is a widely used library, and any changes to its public API have a significant impact on its users. So far, we have evaluated this impact during PR reviews. While this has worked for us so far, it has the risk that a thorough review of public API changes gets lost in implementation comments. Furthermore, separating the PRs that have a public API impact from those that only change the implementation is hard, which effectively causes only swift-syntax contributors to share their opinions on the API design.
To improve this situation, I’m proposing that every change to swift-syntax’s public API should have an accompanying RFC post in the Swift forums, which explains the change and encourages feedback not only from swift-syntax contributors but also from swift-syntax users.
The details of the RFC process are described in Describe an RFC process to request feedback for public API changes by ahoppen · Pull Request #2863 · swiftlang/swift-syntax · GitHub. Let me know what you think.