[tei-council] next release

[James Cummings]

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> James Cummings wrote:
>>
>> Yes, and?  Since we are supposed to not be making changes that break 
>> existing document instances, then we make both typo corrections and 
>> impactful ones with equanimity and then release only occasionally. (I 
>> favour every 6 months.)
> I just have less equanimity than you :-}
> 
> but sure, I'm happy with that.
>>
>> Well, I'm generally in favour of doing what is best for us, rather 
>> than what is easiest -- so if you think branching is best then I'd 
>> like more explanation I guess.
>>
> if you can't imagine a feature/schema change which would be something
> other totally harmless, then branching is probably not needed.

I certainly can imagine these.... but I'm not sure what counts as 'totally 
harmless' and what doesn't. To that end, I reread the Birmbaum proposal at:

http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Council/tcw09.xml?style=printable

(I don't believe this is on the new website...and all the URLs it sites for 
historical TEI materials are equally now broken.)

In any case, I had completely forgotten about the introduction of 
deprecation as a concept, and that makes me feel even happier that at
P5 3.12.345 we can have new structures that possibly replace existing 
structures entirely, as long as the old structures are retained but 
strongly noted as deprecated in their desc.

But we should note that the proposal isn't that we won't break backwards 
compatibility, but just where more substantial and comprehensive breaking 
(i.e. like the change from SGML to XML or the new class system), this will 
be reserved until P6.  It recommends deprecation as a strategy to get 
around interim small minor breakage.  So, if say we want to change @foo's 
datatype (in a way that breaks existing instances) then we introduce @bar 
with that datatype and note that @foo is now deprecated.  Part of the major 
revision for P6 in a few years then, one must assume, will be the removal 
of all the deprecated elements/attributes/classes?

I'm more than happy for David to correct me if I've misunderstood.

-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk