VOUnits: _another_ version, based on implementation feedback

[Norman Gray]

Françoise and Matthew, hello.

I agree that the document has had lots more post-TCG changes than would be expected by the procedure.

However Markus is correct, below:

On 2013 Nov 6, at 08:23, Markus Demleitner wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 06:31:28AM +0100, GENOVA Francoise (OBS) wrote:
>> I agree completely with Pat. We have established procedures for
>> acceptance of standards and at this stage it is too late to bring
>> comments except if there is something so critical that we have to
>> go one or two steps backwards in the procedure and delay acceptance
>> again and again. I did not have the impression that this was the
>> case with these comments.
> 
> You're certainly right in principle.  In the case of VOUnits,
> however, debate was moderate during the WD phase.  Then, during TCG
> review, debate picked up.  This lead to a fairly intensive
> re-structuring of the document, and more importantly, a few
> wide-ranging changes were introduced, first and foremost the quoted
> units.

The syntax of unit-strings is not a particularly thrilling subject, and it was indeed difficult to get much feedback even during the RFC phase.  Therefore it was in the spirit of 'perfection is not of this world', and 'the best is the enemy of the good' (plus the fact that the process had been live for approaching _two_ years!), that we put the document forward for PR status: though the document had weaknesses, we/I didn't feel that we had warrant to make more substantial changes without some community support.

Of course, as usual, its advancement did stimulate some very valuable commentary, with a particularly useful discussion in late July this year, which has led to the changes discussed this week.

I think we can fairly say that the problems related to parsing ambiguities arising from a lack of clarity, in the specification, about the status of known/unknown units, and that resolving these ambiguities led, indirectly but fairly inevitably, to grammar changes.  However, these were not _formally_ objections from TCG members.

Markus has also completed an independent implementation of the spec during this phase.  When documenting those changes, I took the opportunity to clarify the document text fairly extensively -- this will have increased the apparent volume of the changes.

I _think_ that the post-TCG discussion has now reached consensus.  I have some grammar and spec changes to make, but after that I think we should go again round the loop.

The DocStd document <http://www.ivoa.net/documents/DocStd/> says (Sect. 2.2) that "Such revisions must be minor in nature, or else the document must return to Working Draft status."  Perhaps the formally correct thing to do, therefore, is reissue this as a WD and put it immediately into RFC.  I hope that most people who would comment on that would have now commented in the post-TCG phase, so I imagine that this RFC would be quiet, and the document could then be immediately and automatically promoted to PR and thus TCG review.

Then it's finished with!

How does that sound?

All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK