[tei-council] Report of the planning committee

[Christian Wittern]

Dear Council members,

The planning committee has prepared a tracking system that we will use
to work our way towards the release of P5 1.0.  You will find it ready
at http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/trac.cgi

We have tried to identify the open issues and work items that have
been floating around, gathered the things from our previous attempts
at organizing the work and also looked at the SF feature requests,
although they are not integrated into the list at the moment.

We have basically organized the tasks ("tickets" in trac-speach) by
chapter; in addition to specific items relevant to the chapters, there
are a number of tasks that apply to all chapters, these include
* Review general structure in line with comments and write missing
prose  	 	 	
* Review datatype and class decisions 			
* Implement or reject or postpone feature requests 			
* Check text of prose matches specs 			
* Proof-read text looking for references to DTDs and P4 architecture 			
* Proof-read text in general 			
* Review elements for missing examples (Desirable)

Not all of them apply to everything, and many of the tickets can be
closed pretty quickly, so don't be scared by the number of tickets open.

In addition to these chapter specific tickets, there are some tickets
relevant to the output formatting and other programming tasks.

The trac system allows to organize the tickets by milestones, owned
tickets, etc.

Here is how we plan to manage the P5 development process:

* We will ask Council members to take ownerships of tickets.

  The details of this is something we need to discuss.  It might make
  sense to build smaller groups within the Council, who will look over
  groups of tasks like "proofreading", "publication process" etc.
  Suggestions welcome.

  To make changes to tickets, you will need to log in.  I believe
  Sebastian has set it up so that your name will work for the login at
  both prompts.

* Tickets taken should be readied within 7 days of taking ownership.
  If this seems impossible, please either divide up the task or disown
  it in time before the desaster.

* Council members should get a SF account (if not yet done) and will
  be added as developers to the SF TEi project.  We expect everybody
  to checkout the source using SVN (cf. P5 Howto) and commit the
  changes back to SF.  Council members will work on a branch in SF, it
  will be the editors responsibility to port the changes over to the
  main branch.

* Discussion of items and decisions will be done via the trac wiki,
  which is attached to all tickets.  This is not a full blown voting
  system, but I hope it will still be easier to follow than the
  discussions on council-l.  This will document the discussion
  and decision process right in place where the work is tracked as
  well.

* New work items and discussions should take place in the trac
  system.  It is possible, similar to the SF system, to be alerted to
  changes by email (Sebastian, did you set this up?)

As you will see, the timing is crucial and we will need to develop a
habit of keeping promises of commitment once made.

The one big open issue that is not yet covered in the above system is
the list of open feature requests.  Lou and Syd are working through
this as we speek, but it will be important that Council members also
participate in the discussion.  To do this, please go to
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=644065&group_id=106328&func=browse
look at the open issues and comment.  The plan is to be done with this
by 2007-03-01.

The discussion is open now, suggestions for improvement welcome.  If
we can agree on this plan, lets implement it right away.

Christian


-- 

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