[tei-council] open issues and planning

[Christian Wittern]

Syd Bauman wrote:
>> Well, if you (all) don't think we have a *commitment* to deliver
>> TEI 5.0 completely ready for use by the TEI MM 2007, then we ain't
>> singing off the same song sheet.

> Yes, we are singing off different sheets. Some may wonder, but I
> think we are singing the same piece of music, at least, just
> different arrangements, to carry the analogy too far.
> 

I hope that does not mean you disagree to the above statement. I also 
see us firmly committed to have P5 1.0 working smoothly and to 
everybodys delight by MM 2007.

Now, I see that we have disagreement about the details, e.g. what is 
meant by specs frozen etc.  My message indeed intended to get us closer 
to understand how we can do what we have committed ourself to do. As 
always, the problems may lie in the details.  When we said in Kyoto, 
"the specs have to be frozen", this was stating the obvious, namely that 
we need to have stable specs in P5 in order to release this.  However, 
the specs are in fact not monolithic, but come in clusters and 
individual items, with mutual dependency.  While there is still some 
last minute surgery going on in some quarters, I think we have to cordon 
off some areas now and start to do the clean-up there, although we can't
declare the whole building finished.

> 
>>  1st February: accept no more feature requests for 5.0
> 
> This has already happened twice, and need not be repeated. Feature
> requests submitted now would almost assuredly *not* be considered for
> the 1.0 releaes of P5. (Sorry, Daniel.) 

But we should not get carried away by sticking to the letter of some 
protocol.  If there are important issues that prevent <choice> from 
being uses as it is, this is a bug that has to be fixed for 1.0.  If we 
decided to ask people to file bug reports through the SF feature request 
channel (instead of the available bug report channel), we should still 
accept them.  In my book, the "call for feature requests" is what the 
name suggest, namely a request for enhancements or new features in TEI. 
  It would be silly if we would stop listen to reports on problems that 
exist within our existing framework.  In fact, since there has been so 
much underground change in P5 it seems likely that people will continue 
to discover changes, for example in content models that where not 
intended but are a result of the way we re-defined classes.


All the best,

Christian

-- 

  Christian Wittern
  Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
  47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN