[tei-council] Criteria for TEI Repository Inclusion

[James Cummings]

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> On 3 Mar 2010, at 11:25, James Cummings wrote:
> 
>>> no. cos wikis are not, by any stretch of the imagination,
>>> the right tool for software distribution. IMHO.
>> ODDs are not software, they are documentation and meta-schema.
> they are so software! 
>   <elementSpec ident="foo">
> is a specification of a task in a computer language, which an
> appropriate processor will act upon.

We'll have to agree to differ here, to me a schema is not 
software, but the thing processing the schema is software.  It is 
simply a configuration file or documentation file. I'll assume 
we're just using different definitions.  But I think this 
theoretical distinction isn't actually germane to the problem 
we're discussing.

> you only count software as code in which you can write a turing
> machine?

No, I believe no such thing. Plenty of software is not 
turing-complete.  In my mind an ODD is not software because the 
ODD doesn't *do* anything, simply documents the rules by which 
something (validation perhaps) could be done.  The ODD/schema 
processor is software because it takes this configuration file 
and does something with it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who 
makes a distinction between files which do something (whether 
text-based scripts or not) and files which are just inputs to 
those. But again, this isn't getting us anywhere.

-James