EML 2.0 release & Documentation Review

[Chad Berkley]

I would vote for releasing rc1 tomorrow and then releasing rc2 with full
docs next friday.

chad

On Thu, 2002-09-12 at 14:48, Matt Jones wrote:
> eml-dev'ers,
> 
> The documentation takes a lot of work -- very few people have invested 
> much time in it so far (Chad, Chris, and I have done the most), so it is 
> very worthwhile to get some additional eyes critically reviewing it and 
> updating it.  Thanks for your and Scott's contributions here -- they are 
> appreciated.
> 
> Let's assume documentation can't be done by tomorrow, but we need to 
> keep the pressure on to get it done ASAP.  This release has been forever 
> in coming -- lets get it done.
> 
> The schemes are changing, but in fairly minor ways, and only for things 
> that were decided earlier in discussions or in existing bugs.  Nothing 
> out of the blue is happening.  The only remaining schema changes that I 
> know of are described in bug 586 (key validation problems) and 484 
> (changing unit and attributeDomain, and adding more standard units). 
> These shouldn't really impact the documentation effort, and Chad and I 
> will be sure to fully document any new schema changes that happen for 
> those bugs, so you won't have to revisit those sections. The rest of the 
> bugs are documentation bugs (567, 471, 495) or release preparation tasks 
> that can't be done until the last minute (584).
> 
> As for your three issues:
> 
> David Blankman wrote:
> > There are three separate but related issues that need to be addressed:
> > 
> >    1. What approach should be taken with the FGDC derived documentation?
> 
> It needs to be fixed, but it should be the lowest priority because there 
> is a whole standards document backing it up.
> 
> >    2. Should we make a conceptual separation between the documentation
> >       that is embedded in the schemas and user documentation? If we did
> >       this then the documentation review could be speeded up since all
> >       we would have to do is make sure that it is accurate rather than
> >       easy to understand. (The people who have done the development
> >       already understand what things mean and have difficulty judging
> >       whether something is or is not understandable. Even I am may be
> >       too close).
> 
> Yes.  The documentation in the schemas is to document EML itself. 
> Applications that help people create EML are going to have to go a lot 
> further than field definitions to help users create reasonable EML.  For 
> now I guess I would worry mostly about making sure the docs are 
> technicall correct, complete, and reasonably readable so that 
> application developers can use the specification.  End-user 
> documentation is a different ball of wax.
> 
> >    3. When should the Release Candidate be posted?
> >       It seems to me that we have two options:
> > 
> > a.        post the release candidate with the disclaimer that the 
> > documentation is not complete.
> > 
> > b.       delay the release until the documentation is complete.
> > 
> 
> I vote for soon.  I see two the same two options as you:
> 
> a) We can post a release with incomplete docs (RC1) and say that the 
> docs will be improved between RC1 and 2.0.0, but we might be better off 
> with an RC2 if we do that. If we do a release now, it will at least 
> allow others outside of our group to more easily look at what we have. 
> There have been a lot of changes since beta9 for people to digest.  We 
> might even call the current release "2.0.0beta10" if you're more 
> comfortable with that.
> 
> b) We could delay the RC1 release by a week (target next Friday Sep 20), 
> and try to have all of the doc changes done by Wednesday. I will not be 
> able to contribute after tomorrow as I am completely swamped with 
> traveling, so it would devolve to someone else to get the release ready 
> to go (chad?).  There's a lot of last minute details to handle for the 
> release after the schemas are completed. I'm worried that this week 
> delay will easily turn into a month, and I don't want to see that.
> 
> So, given the options, I would vote for (a), release RC1 now, with the 
> possibility of an RC2 if its deemed necessary when the docs are fully 
> completed.  But we should still try to get as much of the doc work done 
> now as possible.
> 
> Cheers,
> Matt
> 
> 
> -- 
> *******************************************************************
> Matt Jones                                    jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
> http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439   Ph: 907-789-0496
> National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
> 
> Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
> *******************************************************************
> 
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-- 
-----------------------
Chad Berkley
National Center for 
Ecological Analysis 
and Synthesis (NCEAS)
berkley at nceas.ucsb.edu
-----------------------