Purpose (and Naming) of LCCR

The old Process titled the Candidate Recommendation phase as
   "Call for Implementations"
described its purpose as
   "At this step, W3C believes the technical report is stable
   and appropriate for implementation."
and announces their publication as
   "W3C Invites Implementations"
puts in its status section boilerplate
   "A Candidate Recommendation is a document that has been widely
   reviewed and is ready for implementation."
The signaling was largely around "we think this is stable, and
we'd like it to be implemented so we can be sure".

The new process proposal removes a lot of this wording, leaving only
   "gather implementation experience"
as one of its purposes in the definition. There is no longer a strong
sense that CR is particularly encouraging implementation experience
at this stage, any more than any other stage. My interpretation is
thus that LCCR is not intended to signal anything wrt implementation.

On the other hand, there is quite a bit of discussion around commenting
deadlines:
   "signal to the wider community that a final review should be done"
   "begin formal review by the Advisory Committee"
   "must specify the deadline for comments, which must be at least
    four weeks after publication, and should be longer for complex
    documents"
the last of which expects that a CR should only be a CR for something
like 4 weeks. If it's a commenting "deadline", then one isn't expecting
it to accept comments for a longer amount of time.
And then there's
   "Last Call Candidate Recommendations will normally be accepted as
    Recommendations. Announcement of a different next step should
    include the reasons why the change in expectations comes at so
    late a stage."
which implies that a CR transitioning back into CR is not expected.
Only CRs transitioning to RECs are expected.

Based on the new Process proposal, I would expect spec work to follow
the following steps:

   1. Cycle through WD for a long time as feedback and implementation
      and testing and usability experience is gathered. (Since CR
      doesn't signal anything except "we're going to REC in 4 weeks",
      and carries a lot of extra overhead for making substantive edits
      there is no justification at all to move the spec out of WD.)

   2. Once you have proof of implementability and all the other
      criteria for REC are satisfied other than the last 4 weeks of
      review, and you publish LCCR to give people that last chance
      to stop the presses.

   3. 5-6 weeks later, publish REC. You're done.

Which leads me to conclude that while LCCR is still an awkward name,
my previous suggestion [1] is totally wrong and
   Last Call Candidate Recommendation
should be renamed to either
   Last Call
or
   Proposed Recommendation
both of which were short, deadlined review phases, and not to
   Candidate Recommendation
which was a long phase with a minimum (not maximum) time period
for gathering implementation-based feedback.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2013Oct/0098.html

Basically, what I'm saying is that the new Process proposal effectively
folds WD+CR together as WD, and LC+PR together as LCCR. It does not
fold LC+CR+PR together (as advertised).

If the workflow outlined above is what the AB intended, then great,
works as intended, but please adjust the name accordingly and advertise
your proposed Process changes more accurately. :)

(If, on the other hand, it's not actually what the AB intended, then
its new Process draft is all wrong.)

~fantasai

Received on Thursday, 28 November 2013 07:05:46 UTC