Re: Non-substantive CR and Director's decision

Mostly adding some more background to the questions


On Wed, Jan 06, 2016 at 10:00:22AM -0800, David Singer wrote:
> Can I see if I can list the questions?
> 
> 1) My understanding is that the W3C Process allows the publication of a revised candidate recommendation *without* Director???s approval if there are *no substantive changes*. It would also mean that no call for exclusions are issued as well.  Is that a correct understanding?
>
> 
> 2) if a member excludes a patent about a feature at risk that is removed during the exclusion period (of the original CR publication), might it invalidate the whole exclusion mechanism?
>
> 3) Is it possible to republish a (editorial only) CR during the exclusion period of the previous one?


2+3 are a single issue, IMHO.

People do review the "original" CR. They might refer to section numbers
for that, same for exclusions. It might be just a practical problem, but
if we allow for republication that changes the section numbering during the
review/exclusion period, it could cause some trouble.
Removing a feature at risk may trigger such a section numbering change and
we could see an exclusion against the wrong part of the spec.

My take on this:

- Either say editorial CR is after the CfE period (60 days after pub),
or  
- say republishing is allowed during the CfE period, the 
reference draft would still be the original CR and disclosures can't 
use section numbers for identification for the portions of the spec covered
by the claims.

For the review comments management, I think it's up to the WG to deal with
the practical aspects, as long as they still address the comments received
before the editorial republication.


> 4) What is the mechanism for resolving a disagreement about whether an update is ???substantive??? or not (notably, when it is published believing it is not, and someone disagrees)?

Team used to evaluate whether a change during LC was substantive or not. 

 
> are there other questions?

How do we identify an editorial publication, from the document itself?
With automated publishing in mind, we need something to make sure it does
not get a CfE (we don't want to miss a CfE for a substantive one either).
I suppose we don't want automatic publishing of the substantive CRs, since
there's a director's decision, but there is no apparent difference between
an automated publication and a manual one so we can't rely on that for CfEs.

Received on Wednesday, 6 January 2016 20:22:20 UTC