On Wed, 16 Jan 2019 at 20:48, Tedd Sterr <[email protected]> wrote:
> I think the first issue is to decide the actual purpose Deferred is meant
> to be serving - according to XEP-0001, that is essentially "was
> experimental, but has had no attention for 12 months;" I don't think anyone
> has a problem with that. The problem comes from nothing happening beyond
> this point; so there they sit: maybe they'll be resurrected, maybe they'll
> just rot. So now we have a huge pile of Deferred XEPs, some of which were
> temporarily left due to the author being otherwise busy, some of those
> subsequently fell off the radar, and others that were intentionally
> abandoned - with little way to tell the difference. Some people are content
> with this ("if the author cares enough, they can always pick it up again");
> others would like to at least remove the entirely-abandoned so it's easier
> to see what's actually relevant.
>
> Jonas's idea is to review one each week, but given that there are
> currently 177 Deferred XEPs, that would take 3.5 years (assuming 50 per
> year) and further months for the additional pile deferred since. Of course,
> doing several per week would be too much work, and a waste of effort that
> could be put to better use.
>
> My own preference would be for Deferred to represent a state of "good
> idea; still needs more work; contributions welcome" - which it arguably
> already does, but it also includes many that should legitimately be
> obsoleted (not that it's worth anyone's time to figure out by what),
> reducing the signal-noise ratio.
>
> For interest:
> - 177 Deferred: 154 Standards, 19 Informational, 3 Historical, 1 SIG
> - eldest: 16.5 years
> - oldest 25%: 10.7+ years
> - oldest 50%: 6.5+ years
> - oldest 75%: 1.3+ years
>
> As a quick first pass, maybe we could take the oldest 25% (44 XEPs),
> community gives them a quick look over to decide whether they could ever
> have any possible minuscule interest, if so they make it known (no
> justification necessary, just the XEP numbers), and then after some
> appropriate period we say that the remainder can safely be rejected. I
> suspect the vast majority of these can be swept away as being no longer
> appropriate/relevant/interesting.
>
Thanks for this. As I said in the Council meeting yeserday, I really don't
care very much about Deferred XEPs which could be moved to a dead state. I
do, however, care about finding the XEPs which should be advanced (or just
revived). I could be persuaded that clearing out the dead wood might make
it easier to find the hidden gems.
Three things leap out at me:
1) Is it worth "cleaning Deferred"? That is, is having 177 documents in
Deferred state a problem?
2) If it is, our current solution to move them to some terminal, dead state
is to Last Call and then Reject them: (Deferred -> Experimental -> Proposed
-> Rejected). Is that OK? Does the community want 177 Last Calls of
pointless documents? Can the Council do this unilaterally (if, of course,
we allowed this in XEP-0001)?
3) Finally, Tedd makes a very good point here in passing - the initial step
of skimming Deferred XEPs can be done by anyone in the community. While the
Council has to agree to put something into Last Call, anyone can request
that of the Council, as (in my guise as Council Chair) I'm happy to have
the Council vote on any Last Call as a general rule.
Dave.
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