[sc34wg3] Editorial structure of N0396

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Sam Hunting
|
| Moreover, I would argue, FWIW, that they are the result of consensus
| about a text as submitted -- not consensus about an imagined text
| that might one day be written.

Once the final text is submitted it is voted and commented on. So
obviously the vote will not be conducted on the N0396.
 
| N0396 has a note that reads "Rewrite this document in the correct
| style for an ISO standard." Until this is done -- and doing this
| seems to me the best way to "move on" -- I don't see how it is
| possible to come to consensus, since there is no text to come to a
| consensus about.

The ISO-conformant text need not be very substantially different from
the text as it stands today. It's primarily the references, the
glossary, some formatting, and some other minor details that need to
change.
 
| Personally, I think Patrick's thinking on a single standard is
| useful and potentially a way forward.

So you started this thread and spent 10+ emails in order to finally,
indirectly, express a proposal that the whole thing be assigned to
somebody to be rewritten to a single document? If so, you could have
saved us all a lot of time by just saying it straight out at once.

That proposal rather boggles the mind. We have SAM and XTM which were
carefully written to fit together, and which do fit together
perfectly. SAM being almost done, XTM not quite there yet, but close.
Then there is HyTM which was also written to fit with the SAM, but
which is further away from completion than those two, and we have CXTM
which is in the same position as HyTM. Finally, there is the RM, which
does not fit together with any of the other parts at all, and which
certainly is not ready to go, either.

It is clear that producing a single document means upsetting the first
four pieces which were designed to fit together, and that it means
mixing the nearly-finished with the nowhere-quite-so-nearly-finished.
That does not seem to me like a sound editorial move, nor do I see any
technical benefit to SAM/XTM/HyTM/CXTM, which all work perfectly fine
as they are.

And, finally, obviously a rewrite of that sort is going to require a
substantial amount of work, as will working out a consensus on what
form such a unified document should take.
 
| My (vague) recollection of the reason for separate documents was
| length.  

One reason given was that we could update the parts independently.
That's why we decided that syntax->SAM deserialization should go
together with the specification of each syntax, rather than with the
SAM.

But as far as I recall this point wasn't discussed much. People just
seemed to feel that it was natural for these things to have separate
documents. 

| As for "moving on" -- no one seems to have thought to ask Patrick
| how long he thinks it would take to produce a unified text. Patrick?

Nor does anyone seem to have thought to ask him what he thinks such an
animal will look like. How close to/far away from the current texts
will it be?

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >