Astropy Proposal for Enhancement 1: APE Purpose and Process (APE 1)

APE stands for Astropy Proposal for Enhancement. An APE is a design document providing information to the Astropy community, or describing a new feature for Astropy or its processes or environment. The APE should provide a concise technical specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature.

We intend APEs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing major new features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python. The APE author is responsible for building consensus within the community and documenting dissenting opinions.

Because the APEs are maintained as text files in a versioned repository (indirectly since this wiki is versioned within github), their revision history is the historical record of the feature proposal