From msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de  Fri May  9 11:40:00 2025
From: msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de (Markus Demleitner)
Date: Fri, 9 May 2025 11:40:00 +0200
Subject: Starting WD-DocStd 2.1
Message-ID: <20250509094000.gzzoni4zbnnlvjh2@victor>

Dear colleagues,

Our specification of the processes when writing IVOA documents,
affectionally called DocStd, has been collecting a bit of dust
(meaning: some things have evolved to proceed differently, and other
things *should* evolve to proceed differently).  Macro, Tom, Pat, and
me have started brainstorming what we ought to fix, and as a first
step I have converted the document to ivoatex and put it into our
(ahem) document managment system:
<https://github.com/ivoa-std/DocStd>.

I have already created a few rather technical bugs that you're
welcome to comment on: <https://github.com/ivoa-std/DocStd/issues>.
Feel free to add more. Two matters we'll be looking at that don't
have bugs yet are:

* Improvements for Errata: Now that we have most of our documents in
  version control, baking errata (or at least references to them)
  into the documents themselves is technically feasible.  There are
  few tricky details, though.  In particular, if you're aware of
  communities that do that kind of thing well, you're cordially
  invited to contribute.

* RFC process: It seems there's a fairly general unhappiness about
  the RFC comments going into ever-growing wiki pages, where it's
  usually hard to figure out whether any specific comment has been
  addressed and if so, how.  There is probably a place for our (ahem)
  document management system in this (let's be honest: github bugs),
  but again it's a matter of working out the details.

Feel free to add to this list (in the githubs issues page).

Marco and I are thinking about a pre-meeting on this to sketch a few
proposals on the Sunday before the Interop (June 1st), somewhere
around College Park.  There are no details yet, but if you'd like to
join us, please drop me a mail.

Thanks,

           Markus