Re: QT4CG meeting 136 draft agenda, 30 September 2025

Thank you for replying.

> I appreciate your perspective. A few points:
>
>   - Closing the issue doesn’t preclude someone from writing a PR to
address it.
>   - The issue has been open for four months and no PR has been
forthcoming. Do you have any reason to believe that a PR is currently being
drafted and will be proposed soon?

How many times did the syntax (operator) and meaning of method execution
change? Is the `%method` annotation existent at present? What is the latest
signature for methods - is the map passed as a parameter, or accessed as
`.` ? Is all this stable now?

The formal description and examples for the methods of the Generator type
are written using this operator and semantics. When this becomes stable,
writing a PR becomes meaningful and I will personally engage with this,
before presenting to other people.

Also, the comments from members of the group (MHK) that "I would prefer to
see it in a separate specification that is not part of the core language
specs", are, to say the least, discouraging. If this group is dictated by
the opinion of a single person, as it is most of the time, we need strong
guarantees that a PR would be judged objectively, regardless of the
pre-existing opinion of anyone.

I am willing to invest time and effort in writing this PR, but we need
clear answers to these questions, so that this effort is meaningful and not
destined for rejection even before it is started.

Thanks,
Dimitre Novatchev.


On Tue, Sep 30, 2025 at 5:53 AM Norm Tovey-Walsh <norm@saxonica.com> wrote:

> Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@gmail.com> writes:
> > Before making decision to close "The Generator record" issue, please, be
> informed that several people have expressed strong support for the idea to
> make the Generator record a standard/pre-defined record in XPath. These
> include Adam Retter, Liam Quinn and Sasha Firsov. Liam Quinn and Sasha
> Firsov even agreed to be considered co-authors for a future Pull Request.
>
> I appreciate your perspective. A few points:
>
> - Closing the issue doesn’t preclude someone from writing a PR to address
> it.
> - The issue has been open for four months and no PR has been forthcoming.
> Do you have any reason to believe that a PR is currently being drafted and
> will be proposed soon?
> - Standards groups have a life cycle. At some point in that cycle, the
> group begins to try to draw a circle around the remaining items that it
> intends to complete for the next version.
>
> When a group begins to look from “what could we possibly do that would be
> valuable/interesting/useful?” to “what must we do in order to declare
> victory on V.next and ship something?” it becomes valuable for for the
> group to start making clear statements about what items are, and are not,
> likely to be included.
>
> That’s not a judgement on the value, interest, or utility of the
> individual items. It’s a statement about what the group believes it has
> energy, will, and participation to finish.
>
> If the group decides to close the issue (it’s merely a proposal on the
> agenda at this time) and the outcome of that decision is that a group of
> authors who disagree with that decision get together and submit a PR that
> addresses the item in a complete, comprehensive, and coherent way, I think
> that would be an undisputable win for everyone.
>
>                                         Be seeing you,
>                                           norm
>
> --
> Norm Tovey-Walsh
> Saxonica
>