Moving the process to github…

Hi,

people have requested that the process document be on github. I would like us to make that change, but there are a couple of questions I think we need to consider.

Rationales given in favour of the change are:
1. This will enable easier tracking of issues.
2. It is easier to contribute changes this way.
3. This will provide consistency of tooling.
4. This will enable diff tracking.

I think 4 is false, since the kind of diff that github produces is also available from the current mercurial repositry, and second because in many cases it isn't very helpful for understanding changes anyway, hence the additional changelog which is part of the document.

I retain an open mind on the others, and will wait to see what happens in reality.

There are a couple of questions that I think need to be answered first:

1. What about where github is blocked?
This has been reported as being the case for various W3C member organisations, based on policy at various different levels. Has W3C done any systematic investigation to determine the scope of the problem, and how affected stakeholders can continue to participate?

2. Producing coherent drafts?
While the document has been in Mercurial, I have attempted as editor to provide periodic updates that are a coherent draft, including a relevant status section, a written change log describing the substantive alterations in drafts, and more recently a diff-marked HTML document to highlight changes between the current editor's version and the currently operative process. How much of this is worth continuing to do, and how do we make it happen, given the workflows of github?

When the group has resolved these questions, I hope the W3C staff will provide a Github repository under the W3C account,to be the primary editor's draft.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - standards - Yandex
chaals@yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Tuesday, 27 December 2016 06:58:41 UTC