Dear Jonathan, all, we have had this discussion about provisional status earlier, and I remember having received quite a bit of support for a proposal to have a provisional status with a fixed lifetime. I still believe this would be better than having to revert changes and create confusing new document versions. I don't know what can be implemented (easily) in GitHub, but I think there are various ways which don't differ too much in what they accomplish, and one of them is hopefully both acceptable and easy to implement: Variant A) introduce a fixed publication cycle for the convention, e.g. every 6 or 12 months with a "moratorium period" of, say 3 months, before publication. This means that changes are only accepted up to 3 months prior to the next publication, so there is a 3 months period for testing and commenting/reverting changes. New changes would go into the next cycle only. This scheme is adopted from software releases ("release candidate"). Variant B) add date label to all changes and automatically accept them after a fixed period (say 6 months) unless these changes were edited/reverted again in the meantime (then, the date label should be changed to the last modification). Variant C) establish a "review panel" to go over modifications on a semi-regular cycle and accept everything that has not been questioned recently. This may sound more personnel-intensive than the other two options, but I would guess that in reality the difference will be marginal if the review panel is kept small.
Best regards, Martin In reply to: Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2015 14:11:33 +0000 From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.greg...@reading.ac.uk> To: cf-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu Subject: [CF-metadata] provisional status for changes to the convention Message-ID: <20150204141133.ga5...@met.reading.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Dear John Thanks for your posting. I have changed the subject so as not to mix it up with the discussion about the format for maintaining the document. The rules expect that a test file is provided to accompany a change to the conventions, but this has rarely or never been done in practice. We could improve the procedure by insisting on this, when it's relevant. I agree with you that provisional status has a cost in complication and has not given a benefit. The idea of provisional status is that it should be easy to reverse provisional changes, I suppose, but we have not written down how this would be done in practice, because we've not needed to. Therefore I would be happy if we abolished provisional status. That means if a change is found to be wrong, it would have to be reversed by opening a new ticket. Perhaps we could make a new procedure to help with this, should it ever be needed. If a ticket is agreed to reverse a previous change which was found to be wrong, it could mean that a new version of the convention is released straight away, with the error corrected, so that it doesn't have to wait to go live, and that the current and any other versions of the convention which contain the erroneous change would then be deprecated. Best wishes Jonathan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH 52425 Juelich Sitz der Gesellschaft: Juelich Eingetragen im Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Dueren Nr. HR B 3498 Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: MinDir Dr. Karl Eugen Huthmacher Geschaeftsfuehrung: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Marquardt (Vorsitzender), Karsten Beneke (stellv. Vorsitzender), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Bolt, Prof. Dr. Sebastian M. Schmidt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list CF-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata