On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 09:22:10AM -0800, Ted Faber wrote:
Getting anyone to change their authoring tool is difficult, so hoping
for standardization on CVS input is pretty unlikely. In my experience,
IETF contributors are an order of magnitude more stubborn than most
authors, but even if that estimate's wrong, I think there's a lot of
inertia here.
One way forward is to put the CVS/RFC2XML system up and hope people
migrate for the advantages. I'm not optimistic, though I happily use
both tools.
Clarification #1: I believe the IETF (tools team perhaps) should
provide version control services (again I favour SVN over CVS but that
is an implementation detail) for WGs who _want_ to use it. Much like
xml2rfc is out there for authors/editors who _want_ to use it. I
request that the RFC editor will accept xml2rfc as an input format.
See also Bert Wijnen's early copy editing experiment where they seem
to have used xml2rfc successfully for copy editing. In other words,
the proposal is not to force people who strongly believe in other
tools to use xml2rfc or the repository. However, I believe having
support for xml2rfc plus revision will be a big step for the community
which already uses the xml2rfc format and is kind of happy with it.
BTW, does the RFC editor have a record which typesetting system has
recently been used to produce the documents that end up on his desk?
Getting some hard numbers which formatting toolset people have
actually used for documents that end up in the RFC editor's queue
would help to understand where we are. If we do not have such numbers,
perhaps we should start an experiement to collect this information for
say three month in order to bring substance into the debate.
Again, let me be precise: I love, produce, use and delight in open
source software. I've even documented some. But as a whole, saying
that open source documentation is no great model of clarity,
completeness, consistency or even presence is being very polite.
Clarification #2: I did not think of open source documentation - I was
referring to the source code itself. I believe there is no fundamental
difference between the production of source code and technical
specification when it comes to the importance of change management,
style guides, bug tracking and long term evolution and maintenance of
revision history. In other words, I believe that an IETF WG needs
almost exactly the same tool chain, namely agreement on common
formats, revision control, bug tracking.
/js
--
Juergen Schoenwaelder International University Bremen
<http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/> P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany
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