This EEP provides a boilerplate or sample template for creating your own Markdown EEPs. In conjunction with the content guidelines in EEP 1, this should make it easy for you to conform your own EEPs to the format outlined below.
Note: if you are reading this EEP via the web, you should first grab the plaintext source of this EEP in order to complete the steps below. DO NOT USE THE HTML FILE AS YOUR TEMPLATE!
This document is based on PEP 9.
EEP submissions come in a wide variety of forms, not all adhering to the format guidelines set forth below. Use this template, in conjunction with the content guidelines in EEP 1, to ensure that your EEP submission won’t get automatically rejected because of form.
To use this template you must first decide whether your EEP is going to be an Process or Standards Track EEP. Most EEPs are Standards Track because they propose a new feature for the Erlang language or standard library. When in doubt, read EEP 1 for details or contact the EEP editors eeps@erlang.org.
Once you’ve decided which type of EEP yours is going to be, follow the directions below.
Make a copy of this file (.md file, not HTML!) and perform the following edits.
Replace the “EEP 33: “ header with “EEP XXX: “ and the title of your EEP, i.e use ‘XXX’ until you have an assigned EEP number.
Change the Author header to include your name, and optionally your email address. Be sure to follow the format carefully: your name must appear first, and it must not be contained in parentheses. Your email address may appear second (or it can be omitted) and if it appears, it must appear in angle brackets. It is recommended to obfuscate your email address. The authors can be a new line separated (following RFC 2822 line continuation conventions) list in which the first author is the EEP owner.
If there is a mailing list for discussion of your new feature, add a Discussions-To header right after the Author header. You should not add a Discussions-To header if the mailing list to be used is erlang-questions@erlang.org, or if discussions should be sent to you directly. Most Process EEPs don’t have a Discussions-To header.
Change the Status header to “Draft”.
For Standards Track EEPs, change the Type header to “Standards Track”.
For Process EEPs, change the Type header to “Process”.
For Standards Track EEPs, if your feature depends on the acceptance of some other currently in-development EEP, add a Requires header right after the Type header. The value should be the EEP number of the EEP yours depends on. Don’t add this header if your dependent feature is described in a Final EEP.
Change the Created header to today’s date. Be sure to follow the format carefully: it must be in dd-mmm-yyyy format, where the mmm is the 3 English letter month abbreviation, e.g. one of Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec.
For Standards Track EEPs, after the Created header, add a Erlang-Version header and set the value to the next planned version of Erlang, i.e. the one your new feature will hopefully make its first appearance in. Thus, if the last version of Erlang/OTP was R13B-3 and you’re hoping to get your new feature into R13B-4 set the version header to:
Erlang-Version: R13B-4
Leave Post-History alone for now; you’ll add dates to this header each time you post your EEP to erlang-questions@erlang.org. E.g. if you posted your EEP to the list on August 14, 2009 and September 3, 2009, the Post-History header would look like:
Post-History: 14-Aug-2009, 03-Sept-2009
You must manually add new dates and check them in. If you don’t have check-in privileges, send your changes to the EEP editor.
Add a Replaces header if your EEP obsoletes an earlier EEP. The value of this header is the number of the EEP that your new EEP is replacing. Only add this header if the older EEP is in “final” form, i.e. is either Accepted, Final, or Rejected. You aren’t replacing an older open EEP if you’re submitting a competing idea.
Now write your Abstract, Rationale, and other content for your EEP, replacing all this gobbledygook with your own text. Be sure to adhere to the format guidelines below, specifically on the prohibition of tab characters and the indentation requirements.
Update your References and Copyright section. Usually you’ll place your EEP under the CC0-1.0-Universal license, in which case just leave the “Copyright” section alone. Alternatively, you can use the Open Publication License or the Creative Commons Attributions 3.0 License, but CC0-1.0-Universal is still strongly preferred.
Leave the little Emacs turd at the end of this file alone, with it
you get a good mode and character encoding, and can e.g fix a
paragraph using fill-paragraph (default [ESC] q).
Send your EEP submission to the EEP editors eeps@erlang.org.
See the Markdown Syntax for general formatting syntax. On top of this Markdown EEPs has these requirements:
The first lines of the EEP is for EEP index generator parsing and the Markdow preprocessing so it must look like the first 10 lines of this file, with that specific style of horizontal rule and header 2 title. Your EEP may have more or less header lines.
EEP toplevel headings are type H1 i.e ==== underlined. The initial
letter of each word must be capitalized as in book titles.
Acronyms should be in all capitals.
Code samples inside sections should be indented 4 spaces.
You must use three blank lines before all H1 headings, and two before all H2 headings.
You must adhere to the Emacs convention of adding two spaces at the end of every sentence. You should fill your paragraphs to column 70, but under no circumstances should your lines extend past column 79. If your code samples spill over column 79, you should rewrite them.
Tab characters must never appear in the document at all.
When referencing an external web page in the body of an EEP, you should include the title of the page in the text, with a footnote reference to the URL. Do not include the URL in the body text of the EEP. E.g:
Refer to the [Erlang Language web site][1] for more details.
:
[1]: http://www.erlang.org
"Erlang Programming Language"
Footnote reference definitions should be placed second last in the document, right before the “Copyright” section and the Emacs magic. Note that these references are invisible in the by Markdown generated HTML.
When referring to another EEP, include the EEP number in the body text
using an implicit link name footnote, such as [EEP 1][]. The title
may optionally appear. The footnote body should include the EEP’s
title and author, and it should refer to its URL.
NOTE: The URL is relative to the current URL and the build tools will fix it to point to the .html file.
Example:
Refer to [EEP 1][] for more information about EEP style
:
[EEP 1]: eep-0001.md
"EEP 1, EEP Purpose and Guidelines, Gustafsson"
EEP numbers in URLs must be padded with zeros from the left, so as to be exactly 4 characters wide, however EEP numbers in the text are never padded.
This document is placed in the public domain or under the CC0-1.0-Universal license, whichever is more permissive.