RE: [office] Thoughts on ODF-Next

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

I think there is another matter of importance to recognize here.

The production of CSDs is cumulative, not modular.  That is, every CSD that
is produced has to incorporate the (current form) of features in previous
drafts and be for all four parts of ODF x.y assuming the ODF 1.2 structure
is maintained.

Furthermore, the cumulative (or even incremental-only) change tracking would
become nightmarish since, presumably, each CSD in the track model would
incorporate entire new features.  

I'm not sure how the subsequent public reviews in such a situation could be
reduced to 15 days, if we are grafting in feature modules at each cut.

Perhaps one might do effected parts only in some Public Reviews, but at some
point we are back to having to do a full review series to put a set of
drafts on the Committee Specification and Standard track.

Maybe we need to take another look at modularization with supplements as
well as the handling of extensions and the prospective movement of
extensions from practice to standard.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: robert_weir@us.ibm.com [mailto:robert_weir@us.ibm.com] 
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 10:27
To: Patrick Durusau
Cc: Michael Brauer; OpenDocument Mailing List
Subject: Re: [office] Thoughts on ODF-Next

[ ... ]

On the other hand, a CSD/Public review does have overhead, both in the 
length of the review, but also on the administrative checks.  Since the 
initial review is the longer review (30-days), there is an advantage to 
doing that as early as possible, to get that out of the way.  Of course, 
once you've done that you have the burden of highlighting changes in 
future CSDs.  But on balance I think we're better of to have a CSD/public 
review early.

[ ... ]