RE: [oic] interop profile or interop advisories ?

[Cherie Ekholm <cheriee@exchange.microsoft.com>]

My apologies for not commenting sooner. I'm buried in another project. This is a really interesting idea. Rob's idea of turning this into a wiki sounds like the right way to keep this dynamic and make it easy to grow or update as needed. And what you said, Bart, about the obvious not always being obvious to everyone is right on. The OIC TC would likely be unneeded if the obvious were obvious to all. I think this merits some more discussion at next Weddnesday's meeting.

Cherie

-----Original Message-----
From: Hanssens Bart [mailto:Bart.Hanssens@fedict.be] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2010 1:19 AM
To: oic@lists.oasis-open.org; dennis.hamilton@acm.org; Cherie Ekholm
Subject: RE: [oic] interop profile or interop advisories ?

Hi,


any further comments on "interop advisories" vs "interop profile" ?

If the proposed "interop advisories" do not address the concerns raised by the
TC Members (wrt the "interop profile"), I just drop the idea altogether and
continue to work on the "interop profile" in its current form...

Best regards

Bart

________________________________________
From: Hanssens Bart
Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2010 9:57 PM
To: robert_weir@us.ibm.com; oic@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [oic] interop profile or interop advisories ?

Hi Rob,


> What would be the audience for this?  it doesn't sound like something that
> end users would get value from.  Maybe implementers?

Uhm yes, I don't think end users get value from the ODF spec either, nor from
a profile :-) They trust that the implementations take care of that...

So indeed, audience would be implementers and the ODF TC (because it might
need to be addressed in a next version)


> We probably want to avoid stating the obvious.  For example, I'll propose
> that the following is obvious:
>
> "Upon reading an ODF document containing Foo, some ODF Consuming
> office application that do not support Foo display the the document incorrectly.
> This may confuse and/or annoy end user."

I agree this is "obvious" for ODF experts, but this particular example is based on
a real issue in a real implementation, so it wasn't that obvious for at least one
implementer :-)

Perhaps it is too obvious for adding it to the spec, but it could be part of a test
suite and/or profile and/or advisory.


> I wonder if the wiki would be a good place for this?  That can be kept up
> to date more easily.

Fine with me, I just want to create something useful (either by continuing to work
on one "big" interop profile or by creating interop advisories)


> Since a number of ODF implementations release updates 3 or 4 times a year,
> a fixed report can easily get out of date.  The nice thing about CERT
> advisories is they name the exact products and version numbers that are
> impacted, so users can check to see if they are impacted by the flaw.  But
> we can't name products and versions.

The OIC TC can't do that, although everyone would be free to use the report as
input for, say, interop reports, demo's plugfests, internal testing, whatever.

I'd be very happy if they get out of date quickly, because that would mean that
the issues are solved quickly :-)


Best regards,

Bart