Hmm. I suppose your CI and code review tools allow code on branches different than master?
So you can directly use them to show a what-if PR. I did; it worked, that is, sparked a discussion and led us to designing things in a better way.
So you can directly use them to show a what-if PR. I did; it worked, that is, sparked a discussion and led us to designing things in a better way.
My objection to using PRs for this is that people think the point of a PR is to merge the code, and people tend to nitpick the code during code-review with the goal of making it clean enough to merge.
The idea of a separate RFC object is that, unlike a PR, you literally cannot merge an RFC, so there's no temptation to nitpick, or really to talk about anything other than the design. It much more closely mimics the social mores of a mailing-list thread discussing a code snippet.
Also, being able to explicitly track Approved and Rejected RFCs on a system level would be nice, to know what discussion needs to be referenced when doing the final implementation. If you just used "what-if" PRs, both the chosen and not-chosen designs' PRs would just end up in the Closed state, and would show up equally in search. Ideally, Rejected RFCs would be filtered out of search by default.