"In-passing errors" and my sense of errata

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

Not wanting to go into repetitive appeals and re-argument, I replied to
Patrick off-list.

I am still not interested in that.  

I am forwarding this to the list because it also provides a declaration on
what you can count on me in terms of the principles that I will follow.
That part is about how I conduct myself.  It is not an invitation to
reconsider anything on the part of the TC.

 - Dennis

Dennis E. Hamilton
------------------
NuovoDoc: Design for Document System Interoperability 
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-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:dennis.hamilton@acm.org] 
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 14:25
To: 'Patrick Durusau'
Subject: RE: [office] Re: #6.8 - Errata Review - "In-passing errors"

I understand about the fear that somehow we would be off scouring the whole
document.  

I don't suppose that and you'll notice that I have been very judicious in
offering where I think it is appropriate to add another item related to an
already-identified defect.

Although I hope you appreciate how weird this looks from the outside, I am
certainly not going to get upset about how this gets worked out.

Meanwhile, when my explorations of the documents bring up oddities, I will
capture them and probably mention them too.  I hate thinking that these be
simply left for others to stumble on when also attempting to master the
specifications.  Having done the work, I am inclined to want to save others
from needing to do it too.  Also, reporting them would also be useful for
informing the ODF 1.2 work.

I look forward to your document.  I will look it over by tomorrow at the
latest, in case there is anything to resolve before next week's call.  My
hope is that enough people look and review the work to tidy up the errata so
that we can approve another review on Monday.

 - Dennis

PS: From a comment that Rob Weir made, my sense is that any re-review of the
errata must be with a markup of the one last reviewed.  Is that your
understanding?

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Durusau [mailto:patrick@durusau.net] 
http://www.iso.org/iso/search.htm?qt=29500&published=on&active_tab=standards
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 13:53
To: dennis.hamilton@acm.org
Cc: ODF office
Subject: Re: [office] Re: #6.8 - Errata Review - "In-passing errors"

Dennis,

In theory I don't disagree with your position on errors in the text and 
don't want you to have the impression that I do.

As a practical matter, however, errata have to be bounded by those 
reported by someone, else how would we know where to stop? One position 
would be that we should create "errata" that when applied would result 
in ODF 1.2. That is certainly possible in theory but I would not want to 
volunteer for the task.

The purpose of this errata is to fulfill our maintenance obligations 
that OASIS undertook when it submitted ODF 1.0 2nd edition to ISO. There 
are a variety of opinions about the process we have or have not followed 
and I don't want to get diverted into that discussion here.

Suffice it to say that this set of errata was created to answer the 
Japanese "defect" report which I referenced earlier today. And yes, 
there were a number of errors in my latest draft that you caught and I 
am very grateful for the hard work.

Yes, the ODF TC needs a vigorous discussion of errata processes, how 
long we will even answer questions about prior versions, etc.

However, my impression is that while ODF is of a great deal of interest 
to many parties, the TC doesn't have unlimited resources and so I 
suspect that at some point we are going to decline to maintain earlier 
versions of the ODF standard. That is just a guess on my part but I 
think it is probably accurate.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

PS: I have been cross-checking against your checks, plus against the 
Japanese errata and both the ODF 1.0 and ISO 26300 text so I am hopeful 
that the version I file tonight will be fairly clean.

Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200809/msg00036.html
> Patrick,
>
> I was not consulting the defect report.  I just happened to see, while
> trying to match up the lines, that there was this other line that had
> exactly the same problem. (I ran into that line by mistake while checking
> the existing errata items and it took extra effort to be sure which were
the
> correct places to apply the existing errata.) 
>
> So I am pointing out this other place in the same table.  In one sense it
is
> the same defect, and I am not so literal about scope (since as a reviewer
of
> the errata as it is disseminated, I have no idea about that - the scope
> restriction is not in evidence).
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