RE: [opencsa-liaison] Reference dependencies in various SCA specs

[Mike Edwards <mike_edwards@uk.ibm.com>]

Sanjay,

I agree with your views.

In the latest round of changes, for
example, I think that Assembly is not affected by the changes to the
other specifications (Policy, WS-Binding,
Java...), even though those changes are normative.

As a result, in my opinion, updating
the Assembly spec to reference the latest CSDs of the other specs
is a purely editorial process.  

Each TC may need to take a vote that
agrees this for any particular spec, but once that vote has
taken place, the update should be purely
mechanical.  No new public reviews are required.


Yours, Mike

Dr Mike Edwards		Mail Point 137, Hursley Park
STSM		Winchester, Hants SO21 2JN
SCA, Cloud Computing & Services Standards		United Kingdom
Co-Chair OASIS SCA Assembly TC
Chair UK ISO SC38 mirror committee (Cloud & SOA)
IBM Software Group
Phone:	+44-1962 818014
Mobile:	+44-7802-467431 (274097)
e-mail:	mike_edwards@uk.ibm.com

From:	"Patil, Sanjay" <sanjay.patil@sap.com>
To:	Anish Karmarkar <Anish.Karmarkar@oracle.com>, OASIS Liaison <opencsa-liaison@lists.oasis-open.org>
Date:	02/08/2011 17:56
Subject:	RE: [opencsa-liaison] Reference dependencies in various SCA specs

---

I think the option 3 provides the required solution while retaining the
independence for the TCs to decide and follow their own schedule. During
CSD publication and PR, specs can make references to the existing source
material as of that time. Later, it should be allowed to update the references
without having to go for another round of PR. I think it is reasonable
to trust the TCs in making a determination about whether a change in a
reference is significant enough to require another round of PR or not.

Sanjay


-----Original Message-----
From: Anish Karmarkar [mailto:Anish.Karmarkar@oracle.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2011 9:22 AM
To: OASIS Liaison
Subject: [opencsa-liaison] Reference dependencies in various SCA specs

As we all know, specs in all the SCA TCs have dependencies on each 
other. For example, Assembly has a normative reference to Policy and 
WS-Binding. To conform to Assembly one has to conform to Policy and 
WS-Binding. Policy in turn depends on Assembly. WS-Binding depends on 
Assembly/Policy. The dependency graph is cyclic.

A similar problem exists in SCA-J TC but without any cycles [1].

OASIS TC process solves this problem of cyclic references by using 
designated cross references [2]. Unfortunately, CSDs cannot use this 
mechanism as the process explicitly excludes it. So, two specs A and B
that depend on each other, will be in an infinite loop wrt updating 
their normative references. Further compounding the problem (but is an
independent issue) is the fact that the new process requires at least 
15-days PR for any change (except the changes on the front page). So any
time spec A or B is updated to update its normative reference it has to
be PRed.

I see three possible solutions to this:
1) Fix the process to allow DCRs for CSDs (this is the only long term 
solution, I think).
2) Use the solution in [1] where spec A instead of using WDXX reference
of B, uses the CSDYY reference of B. Where CSDYY is the what will happen
to WDXX when the TC Admin processes the request for WDXX to be published
as CSD. This means that the CSDs of A and B should be coordinated to go
in the TC Admin queue around the same time.
3) Get TC admin to update normative references when there is no material
change. For example, in (2) above, WDXX and CSDYY are going to be 
identical specs except for the front page. If spec A references WDXX, 
the TC admin should be able to update that reference to CSDYY. A similar
update would have to be done to spec B.

-Anish
--

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/sca-j/201107/msg00028.html
[2] http://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/tc-process#crossRefs

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