Revised RFC 1 - Need Comments

[Daniel Morissette]

Steve Lime wrote:
> 
>   http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-1a
> 
> Feel free to edit, pass along comments, concerns or whatever...
> 

A few comments:

1- Area of authority/responsibilities:

I think the area of responsibilities of the PSC should be defined. All 
that I find in the current document is "... makes decisions on MapServer 
project issues - both technical and non-technical." I guess this implies 
that the PSC mandate is to make decisions on any question that relates 
to MapServer, but that's only implied and not made explicitly clear. If 
we want the PSC to be the ultimate decision making authority for 
anything that relates to MapServer then should we not state that clearly 
in this document? I'm just trying to avoid repeating what happened 
during the "should MapServer join OSGeo?" discussions when we realized 
that there was nobody with clear authority to make that decision.
OTOH, if someone thinks that the PSC should not be the ultimate 
authority with respect to MapServer then we should define what the 
limits of its authority are and who else is responsible for questions 
outside of those limits.


2- Subcommittees or parallel committees?

RFC-1a says: "It is anticipated that seperate "committees" will exist to 
manage conferences, documentation and web sites.  That said, it is 
expected that the PSC will be the entity largely responsible for 
creating any such committees."

Would conference, docs, website and other committees be sub-committees 
or parallel committees? My first idea is to think that they should be 
sub-committees who report to the PSC, a bit like OSGeo committees report 
to the OSGeo board via their chairs. However if others think differently 
I'm open to discussion, but either way I think the relationship needs to 
be made clear here.

3- RFC numbering:

I find that reusing RFC numbers for revised documents can lead to 
confusion. I think RFCs should be set in stone after they have been 
adopted. In this case calling the revised version RFC-1a isn't that bad, 
but would it not be more clear if this new doc was called RFC-20 with a 
note in RFC-1 that it is obsolete and superceeded by RFC-20 (and a note 
in RFC-20 that it is obsoletes RFC-1)?

This way RFC-1 remains available for reference by people reading old 
mail archives or reading old documents that were built against RFC-1, 
and RFC-20 becomes the new reference for new discussions.

I guess calling this revised doc RFC-1a makes some sense since it is the 
root of the committee and we want that to be RFC-1-something, but for 
any other RFCs I think using new numbers and obsoleting old RFCs would 
make more sense. Using new RFC numbers would also allow for a single RFC 
to obsolete several old RFCs at once, which would be impossible if our 
approach is to call revised docs RFC-11a, RFC-11b, etc.


My 0.02$... I'd like to hear what others think on those topics.

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/