Dear all As you know, CF currently uses this email list for discussion of standard name proposals and all other matters except for proposals to change the conventions.
For the latter, we have been using trac for years, but have recently completed migration of that function to GitHub. The source of the CF conventions document is now in GitHub and version 1.7 was generated from it. In future, proposed conventions changes will be discussed as GitHub issues on the conventions repository, and the changes in wording will be finalised in pull requests. This is convenient because it provides continuity from the discussion to the modified document. We are due to prepare and release version 1.8, freeze trac and publish guidelines for using GitHub in future for conventions changes. One of the reasons this has not yet been done is that it's important to keep everyone informed of conventions changes. For a while, postings to the GitHub conventions repository were sent to the subscribers to this email list, but as you remember there were complaints about the amount of traffic, and some confusions were caused by people replying to GitHub by email, so the email feed was switched off while there was further discussion on the CF committee of how to proceed. Now we would like to present a new proposal, as follows: * To change to using GitHub for standard name proposals and all other matters, as issues in a different repository from the conventions (probably called "discuss"). If we make this change, anyone who wishes to make a new standard name proposal or start a discussion thread about something else will need a GitHub username, and will log on to GitHub and post it there as a new GitHub issue. This is not difficult (see below). It does not involve any of the complexity of git for making updates to a repository as this will be a place solely to hold discussions and keep an archive of them. * To make sure that all existing subscribers to this list are kept in touch, postings to the GitHub issues in the discuss and conventions repositories will be distributed via email, initially to all subscribers to this email list. Their subject lines will begin with [cf-metadata/discuss] and [cf-metadata/conventions]. However, it will no longer be possible to reply to them on this email list. The archives will be kept and also copied to GitHub. To comment on a standard name proposal or other discussion, there will be two options: * Either you can log onto GitHub and add to the issue in the discuss repository, * Or you can *unsubscribe* from the broadcast emails (instructions will be given for that), and instead *watch* the GitHub discuss repository. That means you will receive the updates to issues by email from GitHub, rather than via an email list, and you can then reply to GitHub by email. Your reply is magically posted on GitHub. That facility means that you can carry out a discussion of an issue entirely by email, once it's started, not much differently from an email list. We do not wish to lose members of the CF community who are subscribed to this list and remain interested in CF. The main reason for my writing this now is to ask whether there are subscribers who would "leave" us because it's off- putting to use GitHub. Please say if that is what you think before 8th April. Among the advantages of making this change are that * It would allow you to be selective, in that you could chose to be notified about conventions but not standard names, or vice-versa, on GitHub. Of course, we recommending watching both of them! * We won't have to maintain a CF email list, which is an administrative complexity, especially as we currently have two different lists (for trac and email), which have to be kept consistent manually. Anyone can join GitHub for themselves and watch the CF repositories. Best wishes and thanks for your interest in CF Jonathan To get a username on GitHub, go to https://github.com/ and sign up. This is free! Once you have a username, you can sign in. The issues on the CF conventions repository are at https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/issues This shows the list of changes to 1.7 which are being discussed. (NB the name of this repository will probably change, to improve consistency, and this is not the repository for the standard name discussions, which we have not yet created.) If you wanted to start a new issue, which is like a new email thread e.g. for a standard name proposal, you would click the "New issue" button, and get from there to a web form where you type plain text, and then "Submit" it. To comment on an issue (like replying to an email thread) you click on the issue, go the bottom of the page, write in the box, and press "Comment". To receive emails containing comments on any of the issues contributed by others, you can "watch" the repository, by clicking on the drop-down menu labelled "Watch" at the top of the page, with an icon like an eye. When you receive such an email, you can reply to it and your reply will be posted to the issue. (It tells you at the bottom of the email that you can do this, and gives you the URL of the comment that's been sent in the the email in case you want to do it on GitHub.) _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list CF-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
