Version numbering (was: citing IVOA standards)

[Norman Gray]

Mark and Sean,

On 2008 Jun 24, at 09:47, Mark Taylor wrote:

> On Mon, 23 Jun 2008, Norman Gray wrote:
>
>> What certainly is _very_ confusing about the current versioning  
>> scheme <http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/Notes/DocStd/Procedures-20040425.html#WorkingDrafts 
>> > is that the pre-REC and post-REC version numbers are not  
>> continuous: thus WD-1.0 is a different document from REC-1.0.
>
> Gosh is that true?  I kind of had that impression but thought it was
> so weird that I must have misunderstood the scheme.  It is certainly
> very unhelpful.

Ditto in all parts.  I thought it so weird that I asserted it wasn't  
true in an earlier message in this thread.

In fact the document is self-contradictory, since it says in section  
5, "The version numbering scheme for [...] Recommendations follows the  
same pattern[...], beginning with version 1.0: '1.0  // first formal  
release of the document at this level", but then almost immediately  
says "PR V2.1 becomes REC V2.1".

Sean Bechhofer said:

> Why not go the whole hog and adopt the same approach for the REC  
> documents? I believe this is what W3C has done for Recommendations,  
> e.g.
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-ref-20040210/

The problem there is that, while the relationship between two draft  
versions is simple -- the later supersedes the earlier -- the  
relationships between RECs are more various, with a minor update (1.1:  
we've fixed some bugs and had some second thoughts) and a major update  
(2.0: scrub that, we've had another go) standing in different  
relations to the original 1.0.  Both 1.1 and 2.0 might be 'current' at  
the same time, and the relationships seem sufficiently important that  
it's worth making them prominent by encoding them in the title+version.

I've always been a bit perplexed by the 'second edition' form that W3C  
uses.

The discussions at <http://www.w3.org/2005/05/tr-versions> and <http://www.ivoa.net/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/VersioningStandards 
 >, both basically about v2.x standards, suggest that this could get  
complicated.

All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester