Re: End-of-lifing dead documents in /TR/

On 11/16/2011 10:23 AM, Carr, Wayne wrote:
> +1
>
> There are some drafts people bring up to me time after time that are dead, but no one knows.  Even if it says something on a WG wiki, if it isn't in the draft people aren't going to know.
>
> One possibility could be if a draft misses it's heartbeat publication by x months, it automatically gets marked prominently in the status section as not being currently worked on.
>
> If a draft is waiting for something else there could be a prominent note in the status section (or even above it) that says what it is waiting for, with periodic updates that they are still waiting.
>
> If the status isn't being updated, it could be marked dormant and finally something like withdrawn (and marked in the same way if the WG decides to drop it).

+1 to having an Unmaintained status. We should also be able to mark
RECs as Unmaintained. CSS1 and HTML4, for example, are not getting
errata anymore.

For auto-marking... I think 3 months is too short. We'd have a lot
of actively-edited CSS drafts get marked as abandoned that way.
While some of our modules should be updated and pushed to /TR more
often than they are, in other cases the draft is just being edited
in slower cycles and doesn't need to be republished every 3 months.
A year would be better; the WG should be able to request Unmaintained
status sooner, but as an automatic thing I think a longer period
of time is better.

For CR-level specs, the period should be even longer (multiple years),
since in many cases they are not being updated because there are no
changes to make, only implementations and testcases to build.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 16 November 2011 18:44:15 UTC