[DDI-SRG] bug minor and major

[Wendy Thomas]

No wonder this sounded familer :)  Here is a clip from the May 2008 Expert 
Committee minutes. (more from me after clip.

"Timeline and Next Steps
With DDI 3.0 having been published on April 28, the specification is now 
in "stabilization mode." At this point, we need to focus our energies on 
education, tools, and outreach. The Usability and Outreach Group (UOG), in 
consultation with the TIC, will need to be very active during this period. 
However, this does not mean that working groups should be idle. They 
should continue to meet because the process of developing new elements 
takes a long time.

In terms of uptake of the standard, we have a small group of early 
adopters and will be creating editing tools in the next six to nine 
months. It will probably be 12 to 18 months before we have a more 
significant number of adopters. With the new life cycle orientation of 
DDI, new audiences like statistical agencies are showing interest, and 
there may be new constituencies that we are not yet aware of.

With respect to the revisions process, according to the Bylaws we have 
four basic types of changes: bug fixes, minor revisions without review, 
minor revisions with review (a scaled down process), and major versions 
requiring the full review process.

There is a provision for the Director to approve some minor changes upon 
recommendation by the TIC (these types of changes include bug fixes, 
documentation changes, controlled vocabularies, etc.), but other minor 
revisions require review. The TIC proposed that we redefine the revision 
process in terms of whether there is backwards compatibility.

Specifically, the TIC proposed (and the Alliance approved) that:

TIC will assess the bug tracker Mantis every three months and make 
recommendations to the Director: No release; bug fix; minor with review; 
or minor without review (a major revision will always be decided by the 
Alliance).
Not more than two releases will take place per year (each release requires 
namespace changes in applications).
We may move to a system of fixed-date releases once the specification is 
stable.
Controlled vocabularies will be produced and disseminated separately from 
the schemas and will use OASIS Genericode standard for markup. They will 
have their own publication cycle. We expect the first release within three 
to six months.
It was further emphasized that we do not want a new version 3.1 coming out 
soon because we want people to be able to adopt the specification with 
confidence."
END OF CLIP


So I think right now we send Mary the message that as of this three month 
date (January 2008) we recommend no revision. That we anticipate a 
revision for April 2008 that will either be a bug plus minor revision 
without review or a minor revision with review. The exact nature of the 
revision will depend on our review of the current bug list.

Wendy

Wendy L. Thomas                          Phone: +1 612.624.4389
Data Access Core Director		 Fax:   +1 612.626.8375
Minnesota Population Center              Email: wlt at pop.umn.edu
University of Minnesota
50 Willey Hall
225 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455