Hi, Ray,
to my believe the main source of disagreement on your proposed version scheme is that we have a different idea of its scope.
The DC needs to enumerate documents - again, documents only - in a way that is enough for readers to identify them. This is already the case by assigning a release date and title. Even the simplest version number is already redundant information in this context.
All the rest of the discussion belongs to software development and maintenance - it's nothing that the reader of standard documents needs to worry about and therefore such internal bookkeeping doesn't need to be exposed on the official doc. tree and hence DC doesn't need to worry about it.
> So, if can suffer through more of my opinion, read my detailed reactions
> below.
ditto ...
In the note (http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/DocStdProc.html) it says that there can be supplementary resources (like Schema) which the DC publishes as is, i.e., embedded version info stays untouched. This will assure consistency with the source of information which is most likely some CVS system or some other dev. suite that is assigning revision numbers. Mapping such numbers to a uniform IVOA scheme implies that there can be 2(!) version numbers for the same item.
If you think this is really essential and justifies the overhead of such an endless source of potential confusion then I'm not against introducing such a scheme: BUT, the mapping of the two namespaces has to be maintained internally (for instance on the Wiki) and by the relevant people in each WG and NOT at all by the DC. I vehemently object to offload the task of enumerating configuration files onto the shoulder of the DC. (For instance, the Wiki uses RCS to automatically assign revision numbers to topics and each attachment. It'll be fun to maintain a mapping with this kind of source.)
Conclusion:
1. introduce an IVOA version scheme (on top of RCS, CVS etc.) where the
community considers it essential, but not for the official doc. tree.
2. If it appears inconsistent to have a doc. tree with a different scheme, then let's remove version numbers from official documents altogether and simply use title and release date to identify them.
Markus Received on 2004-04-03Z15:07:21