[CF-metadata] provisional status for changes to the convention (Jonathan Gregory)

From: Schultz, Martin <m.schultz>
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2015 15:49:48 +0000

Dear Jonathan, all,

    we have had this discussion about provisional status earlier, and I remember having received quite a bit of support for a proposal to have a provisional status with a fixed lifetime. I still believe this would be better than having to revert changes and create confusing new document versions. I don't know what can be implemented (easily) in GitHub, but I think there are various ways which don't differ too much in what they accomplish, and one of them is hopefully both acceptable and easy to implement:
Variant A) introduce a fixed publication cycle for the convention, e.g. every 6 or 12 months with a "moratorium period" of, say 3 months, before publication. This means that changes are only accepted up to 3 months prior to the next publication, so there is a 3 months period for testing and commenting/reverting changes. New changes would go into the next cycle only. This scheme is adopted from software releases ("release candidate").
Variant B) add date label to all changes and automatically accept them after a fixed period (say 6 months) unless these changes were edited/reverted again in the meantime (then, the date label should be changed to the last modification).
Variant C) establish a "review panel" to go over modifications on a semi-regular cycle and accept everything that has not been questioned recently. This may sound more personnel-intensive than the other two options, but I would guess that in reality the difference will be marginal if the review panel is kept small.

Best regards,

Martin


In reply to:
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2015 14:11:33 +0000
From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory at reading.ac.uk>
To: cf-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu
Subject: [CF-metadata] provisional status for changes to the
        convention
Message-ID: <20150204141133.GA5006 at met.reading.ac.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Dear John

Thanks for your posting. I have changed the subject so as not to mix it up
with the discussion about the format for maintaining the document.

The rules expect that a test file is provided to accompany a change to the
conventions, but this has rarely or never been done in practice. We could
improve the procedure by insisting on this, when it's relevant.

I agree with you that provisional status has a cost in complication and has
not given a benefit. The idea of provisional status is that it should be easy
to reverse provisional changes, I suppose, but we have not written down how
this would be done in practice, because we've not needed to. Therefore I would
be happy if we abolished provisional status. That means if a change is found
to be wrong, it would have to be reversed by opening a new ticket.

Perhaps we could make a new procedure to help with this, should it ever be
needed. If a ticket is agreed to reverse a previous change which was found
to be wrong, it could mean that a new version of the convention is released
straight away, with the error corrected, so that it doesn't have to wait to
go live, and that the current and any other versions of the convention which
contain the erroneous change would then be deprecated.

Best wishes

Jonathan



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Received on Wed Feb 04 2015 - 08:49:48 GMT