[tei-council] P5 editing environments

[Lou Burnard]

At the last council call I was actioned to request input from all 
council members about (a) their personal preference for a TEI editing 
environment (b) their opinion as to the desirability of setting up a 
distinct editorial subcommittee

On the first question I received five responses, from Christian, James, 
John, Syd, Julia,  and Susan. If other council members have sent me a 
response, please could they re-send it or remind me? (I am not expecting 
a response from myself or Sebastian, since I know what it would be in 
both cases!)

There seems to be a consensus in favour of our current distribution 
mechanism, which is reassuring. It's also clear that we need to do more 
on making the installation process for Macs a bit less hostile. Maybe 
someone would like to work on that? And I don't know anything about 
jEdit -- could Susan tell us what  (if anything) we should do to make 
that easier to use with P5?

Responses are quoted below.

As to the editing environment, I am using GNU Emacs or XEmacs on MacOS 
X, occasionally also Oxygen (mainly for teaching purposes). For the 
moment, I personally am fine with a tarball that I can unzip in 
/usr/local/somewhere, but in the longterm a fink package or even a Mac 
OS package is desirable.

As for my personal use of TEI P5: primary system: Debian GNU/Linux running Emacs/tei-nxml secondary system: Mac OS X running oXygen
tertiary system: Mac OS X running Emacs/nxml
quaternary system: Mac OS X running jEdit
quinary system: SunOS (solaris) running Emacs/nxml
senary system: Debian GNU/Linux running oXygen
(I haven't actually used any but the 1st 2 yet.) The WWP encoders use
the SunOS system, so eventually I will have to have P5 working fine
and dandy on that, but there's no rush there. I won't be
experimenting with P5 on that system for quite awhile.

My XML editor of choice is emacs with James Clark's nxml-mode.  I also 
use Oxygen on occasion for some tasks.  I'm generally working on a 
Unix-like operating system, usually Mac OS X, sometimes a flavor of 
Linux.  I keep my catalogs in /etc/xml and my DTDs, schema, entity 
files, and other miscellaneous XML stuff in /usr/local/lib/xml.  I 
think /etc/xml is a convention of sorts across Unixes.  I picked 
/usr/local/lib/xml myself.  From this morning's discussion it sounds 
like /usr/share/xml or /usr/local/share/xml may be more of a 
convention.  For myself, I don't need any special packages or 
installers, just the files, but I'm sure user-friendly packages and 
installers will be appreciated by many TEI users.

Hi Lou -- I use jEdit -- I've used it on a PC, but now I have both a PC 
and a Mac -- so I'd like to use it in both environments

Lou, I'd be using oXygen on a Mac in private life; at the WWP we'd be 
using emacs under unix.

I use tei-emacs and oXygen on both Debian Linux (unstable) and
Windows XP. If you want my two euro-cents: I think the path layout on windows, 
should just be: c:\Program Files\TEI\ Which then contains a tei-emacs directory where the tei-emacs for windows would install, and then an exact mirror of the debian packages
from /usr/share/xml/tei, so a schemas and a stylesheet directory.  And 
it should also contain a 'doc' directory that contains everything under 
/usr/share/doc/tei-doc/ ... or at least something similar that is 
trivial to build automatically from the same process used to build the 
debian packages.  People will have to customise their editors to work 
with it (or those creating the editors) in any case, so making it the 
simplest and most easily contained structure seems reasonable to me. 
Well, you did ask for our opinions.

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On the second question, I received so little input that I don't think anything can be said about what the Council's overall view is. The comments I received are quoted below:

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I think the editorial committee is a good idea, and I'd be willing to 
serve on such a committee.  I think three members of the Council would 
be a good number for this committee.  My understanding is that we are 
not to nominate people at this point, but rather express our general 
opinions about the topic and our own willingness to serve.

Also, I have no problems with the existence of a TEI P5 Editorial 
Management Committee, though don't think it is something anyone would 
think that I'm qualified for myself

I would also be willing to serve on the editorial committee.  One of the tasks I see for this
committee with a high prioriry is to devise a process for reaching
decisions on the road to P5 and resolving conflicts, for example
between WG's and the Editors.  We also need to think about how exactly
getting the Council members to do the work they have been elected for.

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