PEP 684: Minor Updates - #3004

Hey, so just FYI, at least the modern link form of Post-History is intended to keep a record of the current and past Discussions-To threads; you don't need to worry about updating it with a link to individual messages sent to the existing thread saying you've made an update to your PEP.

If the update is major enough, you could consider posting a fresh "Take 2" (or 3, 4, etc) discussion thread and updating the Discussions-To and Post-History accordingly, per current convention. And if you want to keep a record of major changes, or links to messages about the same, you're of course welcome to do so as a subsection of your PEP in whichever format you prefer.

The linter intentionally ensures that Discourse links are to the thread rather than to an individual message, per the above, and also because it is a pretty easy mistake to make by accident as if you've scrolled past the first message, the message number will be appended to the URL, leaving readers unintentionally stuck in the middle of the thread rather than at the start (which also messes with Discourse's bookmarking of where you left off reading a thread). Also, as the headers are intended to be structured data in an easily-machine-parsable format, consumed by a number of tools in this repo and many more through the PEP API, including PEP-o-tron, the Python Discord bot, and others, it's best if they are as consistant as possible.

As such, I've opened PR #3005 to fix the issue.

FWIW, I find it useful to identify each round of discussion. In this case I re-used the same thread, since it is the one in the Discussions-to header. I guess for future PEPs I will start a new thread for each round, which is what I'd always done in the past. However, it's unfortunate since having a single thread for the PEP makes a lot of sense (e.g. more searchable, less ambiguous, no need to update Discussions-to). Doing what I did in this PEP still makes the most sense to me. That said, it isn't that big a deal. 😄

Hey, thanks for taking the time to explain your reasoning and the benefits you feel it brings for authors and readers. After some thought, in light of that I think there's a relatively clean workaround in the linter that will still detect cases where a specific message was unintentionally appended (e.g. due to scrolling), but still allow intentionally linking directly to a specific post if the author is convinced that is best for their PEP. See PR #3005 for more discussion on that.

Thanks for not dropping this, even though that would have been okay. 😄