Document Series

[Ralph Droms]

My experience with DS and full Standard is that no one is interested
because of the lack of perceived difference between the requirements
between the standards levels and the lack of perceived added value
in progressing a spec to DS or full standard.  That is, I disagree
with Brian's statement about the requirements for DS and full standard
being too high - I think the problem is a lack of differentiation
among the three standards levels.

Here's how I see the standards track:
The required correctness for PS is high enough that a PS spec is
"good enough" for vendor implementation and deployment.  The
reward for moving to DS and full standard is not worth the
investment of effort.

The tension I see is the need for a specification that is
sufficiently baked and stable to be used for prototyping,
interoperability testing and proof-of-correctness for the
spec doc, but that does *not* result in deployment.  It's
the premature deployment that (a) casts goofs in the spec
in stone and (b) eliminates any motivation to move the
specification through the standards track.

- Ralph

At 02:58 PM 6/4/2003 +0200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>Keith Moore wrote:
>> 
>> O> My understanding is that the higher bar to PS arose as a consequence of
>> > things being widely deployed at PS and things not advancing to Draft rather
>> > than the deployment and non-advancement being a consequence of the high bar.
>> 
>> that's my understanding also.
>> 
>> > This is important in the sense that if the lack of advancement came first,
>> > then simply lowering the bar will not help us get better standards, and in
>> > fact could result in our ending up with lower quality documents permanently.
>> 
>> I'm in strong agreement with this.  What we need to do is find a way for
>> standards to at least the level that is currently required for PS more
>> quickly, not to lower the bar for PS.  
>
>Fully agree.
>
>> We might even need to raise the bar slightly.
>
>Do you mean that we are frequently releasing PS documents that contain
>significant defects? We certainly can't expect PS documents to be perfect.
>
>Another problem I see is that the barrier to Standard is so high that
>nobody is interested, and the barrier to DS is high enough that very
>few people are interested. That being so, apart from some academic
>ideals, I question the value of having 3 grades at all. Since we hardly
>use the top two grades, why have them? 
>
>   Brian