Re: [wsrf] Doc management proposal

[Frank.Leymann@t-online.de]

Martin,

are there some details about the review process within the TC to move
the Editor's Draft to Working Draft status?

Frank


-----Original Message-----
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 12:47:54 +0200
Subject: [wsrf] Doc management proposal
From: "Martin Chapman" <martin.chapman@oracle.com>
To: <wsrf@lists.oasis-open.org>

The issues process defines how we resolve an issue and incorporate into
a document (aka TC work product).
Depending on frequency and editing resources a new version of a document
may incorporate one or more resolved issues.
Issuing versions of documents too frequently to the whole TC can cause
confusion as to what is the latest valid document, esp when trivial
changes have been made (e.g. typos).
In the issues process, an individual issue is validated (similar to a
unit test), but sometimes one issue overlaps with another. The only
opportunity to check these overlaps is to review the document as a whole
(similar to a system test) and ask the whole TC if it is an acceptable
new baseline. 

To support the above, I propose we have two types of drafts, borrowing
from many other groups within OASIS, and from
W3C and WS-I.

An Editors Draft, reflects work in progress in folding in issues. While
each folded-in issue has been validated by the editor and a third party,
cross issue checking may not have been done, and the whole TC would not
necessarily have reviewed and approved (especially the editors freedom
resolutions).

A Working Draft (or TC Draft, pick your favourite term) reflects a
baseline of folded in issues and cross checked dependencies, and has
been accepted by the TC.

A move from Editors draft to Working Draft requires a vote of the TC.

The benefits of this approach are:
 1. the editors don?t necessarily have to release to the whole TC each
individual update, 
    giving them freedom to work in the background
 2. its very clear what the current view of the TC is, the latest
Working Draft is the authority to work from.
 3. it gives the opportunity to check point the document as a whole and
to examine any potential cross issues 
    editing effects.
 4. Moving to a working draft also allows those resolutions that give
editors freedom ("do the right thing") 
    to be checked by the TC as a whole.


Eventually the TC will vote to move a Working Draft to a Committee
Draft, which signals 
stronger stability to the outside world.

I hope we can have a few minutes at the F2F to discuss.

Cheers,
   Martin
_________________________________________________________________
Martin Chapman                                 
Consulting Member of Technical Staff           
Oracle                                        
P: +353 87 687 6654                           
e: martin.chapman@oracle.com