Dear Chris, Stephen, et al. Thanks for your helpful explanations. That helps me to understand.
> 3) We move discussion to gitHub issues, rather than TRAC tickets. If git has a way to carry out a discussion in public like trac, in which everyone's contributions are recorded and public and submitted in plain text, but offers other useful features too, that's worth considering. > 4) We use somethign other than DocBook XML for the document - XML does not > lend itself to an SCM, and non-experts editing the doc. If a different format would be better for generating the final documents in various forms, and is easy to work with, it is worth considering, but ... > 1) We manage the development of the CF-2.x.x document in a source code > management system, much like a software project > 2) ... the whole fork-pull-request thing for updating the document. I don't think this is appropriate, and I don't think contributors in general need to edit the document. The convention is a document, not a collection of source code files. The trac tickets are mostly about how and why to modify it, illustrated by the proposed change. That is different from software, in which the modified code speaks for itself (to some extent), and is accompanied by much shorter descriptions of how and why it is has been modified. Also the CF doc is a *single* document, so there isn't the need to keep lots of files consistent when making updates. It *could* be broken into lots of documents, but I don't see an advantage in that. I think that the difficulty in updating the document is not that we have inconvenient software for doing and facilitating it. It is the intellectual difficulty of working out what the changes should be that makes the process slow. When we have agreed a ticket, enacting it in the doc should be simple. That is happpening slowly now, I presume, because of lack of person-time to do it, rather than that the software is awkward. It could be helped perhaps if volunteers could do it (as Mark Hedley suggested quite a while ago) but there would still be the need for quality-control - someone would have to take responsibility for checking that the change was as agreed. Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
