[tei-council] the release conundrum

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Syd Bauman wrote:

>Sebastian's view of the process (reproduced below) sounds good to me,
>too. However, I think 6 months is an enormously long time to wait
>between releases. 
>
Sure, I agree. after 6 months alarm bells should ring

>I also think it is vitally important, Sebastian, that you write up
>the procedure for making a release, so that someone else could be the
>release manager without fuss.
>  
>
there are two, independent, parts to this:

 a) doing "make dist" on the source, and then releasing the resulting .zip
      files on Sourceforge; the good folks on SF explain all this
 b) making Debian packages, installing them, and then exporting the result
      to the TEI web. trouble is, this means having a working process
      to create Debian packages on a shared machine. Sadly, we don't
      possess a machine running Debian which I can set up to do this.
Currently
      its on my laptop. Thats BAD.  But I don't quite know how to proceed.

in general, I really don't like the fact that we have retreated to
a position in which no-one but me is really familiar with the
the TEI P5 tool chain and its ramifications. the NSF project
was supposed to deliver us from that :-}

>weeks. On the other hand, we need to decide at some point who else,
>if anyone, gets R/W access to the CVS tree. E.g., Laurent is working
>on both the dictionary and the terminological databases chapter --
>should he be doing this directly in CVS? David Durand is working on
>the linking chapter -- should he?
>  
>
I  believe that commit rights to the CVS tree should be given
to any member of a TEI working group who asks for them. The
barrier is getting onto a working group.

I suspect others will want more "control", but I express the above
as a personal preference.

Absolutely yes we want more people checking out the CVS tree,
and familiarizing themselves with the source and how to use it;
and that means trusting them to commit code.

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      
Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

OSS Watch: JISC Open Source Advisory Service
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk