Greetings,
On 2008 Jun 17, at 00:41, Séverin Gaudet wrote:
> "Standards numbering nomenclature" (http://www.ivoa.net/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/TCGStandardsNumberingNomenclature
> ).
The proposal here strikes me as being more intricate than is necessary.
The role of version numbers is (a) to distinguish versions from each other unambiguously, and (b) to indicate _some_ functional relationships between versions. In the case of documents, these relationships are much simpler than they are in the case of software, basically limited to one document superseding its predecessor.
To me, the proposed scheme is confusing, because it tries to encode the document's status (as WD, RFC and so on) in the version number, and does so by implying that a document with version number 0.9 is somehow 90% of the way through its process (version numbers are not real numbers).
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.
I can't find any cast-iron guidance on versioning at w3.org (surprisingly), but in the W3 WD I'm currently most familiar with (the SKOS one), they appear to be using date as their only pre-REC version number.
So, I propose:
Thus for a given document, we will have DRAFT-20080101, WD-20080201, PR-20080301 and either REC-1.0 or plain '1.0'. That scheme is monotonic (so satisfies properties (a) and (b)), and makes the document's status explicit rather than implicit.
Since this thread started with Igor's remarks about ADS bibcodes, I suggest that RECs have 'n.m.' as their PPPP and an explicitly noted four-character code for their VVVV; I don't expect ADS would be interested in giving codes to any pre-REC documents.
Best wishes,
Norman
-- Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk Physics and Astronomy, University of LeicesterReceived on 2008-06-24Z08:03:22