Sorry for the slow reply here – I’ve been feeling guilty about not getting back to you, but between the US holiday/work/general uncertainty about whether it was acceptable to change the PEP at all I haven’t found the chance to reply until now.
Yeah, they’re the same thing, except apparently “strict majority” is a term I made up that no-one else uses. Whoops. Thanks for pointing that out. Fixed here: PEP 8016: remove confusing term "strict majority" by njsmith · Pull Request #846 · python/peps · GitHub
@dstufft and I talked this over today, and we both generally felt nervous about making changes at this point. (Partly this is my fault for being slow to follow-up, but partly it’s because this didn’t come up until we were already in the “final review period”.) How worried about this are you?
Even though promoting core devs is frequent (we hope!), I don’t think this affects it too much. If the steering council doesn’t use their veto, then they just… do nothing, and the core dev is promoted. The only time the veto makes any difference is if they actually use it, which will hopefully never happen. So if you’re worried that this will add a lot of complications to regular promotions, I don’t think you need to worry about that.
Also, if PEP 8016 is selected, then making small tweaks to the text like this is doable. It takes a little bit of work – someone has to propose the specific change, and somehow count who’s in favor and who isn’t, but that’s all. If it’s an uncontroversial change then I don’t think it should be hard to do. (And we might be doing this to tweak the council term anyway – see here.)
If you’re really worried about this, and the timing works out, the specific change we talked about possibly making is: adding the sentence “Veto votes follow the procedure described in the ‘Ejecting core team members’ section.” But, I think we’d rather not change it at this point, if you’re OK with that.
If we don’t change it now, and PEP 8016 does end up getting selected in the vote, then feel free to poke me once things have settled down and I’m happy to help figure out how to make a fix-up proposal, like I described above.
What do you think?