Observing the RFCs going through recently, I, and from what I can tell many others, have been overwhelmed by the number of comments and discussions going on. It’s hard for even the RFC author to keep track, let alone community members who wish to contribute.

We’ve already had some proposals in this space. Refining RFCs part 2: RFC staging from http://aturon.github.io/blog/2016/07/05/rfc-refinement/ is one of them. Another idea is the concept of each RFC being its own repo (as the nonlexical lifetimes RFC was), with discussions conducted on issues giving it a more structured view.

These both propose changes to the process. I’m rather positive towards both of them, but changes to the process require far more thought and time.

Instead, I wish to encourage folks to help out within the existing system!

One thing that really helps RFCs is summary comments. Basically, a single comment describing the state of the discussion – linking to each high-level issue, and major opinions on either side of each issue, as well as noting which issues are resolved/unresolved. I recently made a mini-comment of this form in https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2116#issuecomment-327949147 , and I’ve noticed team members making larger versions of this comment on other RFCs in the past.

It would be nice if this was a tiny bit more formalized; with some guidelines on how to make such a comment, and having RFC authors (or others with maintainer access on the rfcs repo) edit the pull request body to link to the recentmost summary.

What do y’all think? Will this help? If so, what exactly should the guidelines be?