[tei-council] open issues and planning

[Christian Wittern]

Dan O'Donnell wrote:
> Obviously it is a fine line: we also can't put out substandard work
> either (not that that's ever been a TEI problem). And the Board and
> several TEI partners seem quite interested in stability after P5 (i.e.
> we should perhaps not move on to P6 right away if P6 means major
> revisioning). Given the nature of what we are up, therefore, to perhaps
> we should define "bug" to mean major conceptual issues with finished
> work as well. What I mean by this is if somebody discovers a major flaw
> in the underlying reasoning--something that would require us to move on
> to P6.

We did debate this to some degree several times, most extensively in
Kyoto last year.  There is an obvious requirement to refine the model,
but we also need stability.  Further maintenance of P5 would therefore
occur as subsequent (compatible) releases 1.01, 1.1 etc, whereas a major
new overhaul that might break existing stuff would eventually be
developped as P6 -- but this is not on our screen at the moment.  In
fact the whole point behind the document prepared by David Birnbaum on
our request (http://www.tei-c.org/Council/tcw09.xml?style=printable) is
to balance these two conflicting objectives and lay down our view of how
we want to deal with them.

> 
> I suspect from the above exchange that what we are really looking at is
> agreeing on and formalising what we mean by frozen and what makes
> something frozen: the things Syd mentions as not frozen fit Sebastian's
> definition of frozen. Should process (or project management for the next
> ten months--yikes!) be an agenda item after all? It certainly does seem
> to me that we need to say "x is done--to propose changes, there needs to
> be a serious issue involved."

yes, so let' try to nail this down, by all means. We did occasionally
try to implement deadlines and milestones, but overall this was not very
successful.  The major blame lies with the Chair of the Council, but
there are other bottlenecks as well. There is a document "P5 today:
current state of play
"(http://www.tei-c.org/Drafts/edw81.xml?style=printable), which was
intended as a means to give us a handle to see where we are in the
development.  This document classifies each chapter into different
categories according to the type and degree of work that needs to be
done.  Unfortunately, this has not been updated for 2 years, so it does
not reflect changes since then.  Maybe we should start by confirming the
status of each chapter and see how many of them can be declared frozen.
Again, I think this document would also benefit from being moved to an
environment that allows easier updating to reflect the changes made.

This is part of what I would like to discuss under agenda item 3, road
to P5.

All the best,

Christian

-- 

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