First feedback on the GitHub usage

[Ole Streicher]

Hi all,

On 02.12.19 22:36, Patrick Dowler wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Nov 2019 at 09:45, François Bonnarel wrote:
>> So, I'm not really positive about moving to github in these conditions.
> 
> I guess all I can say here is that I agree with everything you said and
> maybe the only "issue" is that github was seen/expected/presented/sold
> as the bug magic replacement for everything that was going to make it
> all better and we'd be able to produce new standards in a few months. Of
> course, it doesn't do that at all -- we all still have to do the real
> hard work and github can help with a portion of it. From my point of
> view, it helps with (i) track things we agreed to do or change, (ii)
> accept implementation of those changes, (iii) review the implemented
> changes. It is not far off to be able to (iv) automate testing that
> changes did not break the document build, (v) automate publish the
> latest cutting edge document where everyone can see it*, and (vi)
> automate publishing to the IVOA doc repo under some condition (maybe
> something like tagging the repo as WD-Foo-1.1-20191225).

One addition to point (i) here: Github issues and pull requests are also
well-suited to discuss and agree on changes and extensions of the
standard. One of the goals of the Github transition was to make this
process more transparent and reproducible. So, the idea is in my opinion
*not* to agree on a change behind closed doors, but to use the Github
tools (issues, PRs) to find an agreement, to enable others to follow and
contribute to this process, and to have a public log of it for later
reference.

There is no need to "restrict" some part of the development process to
the authors. On contrary, the "magic" of Github is exactly that
transparency. And this will pay off in the long term.

Best regards

Ole