From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Apr 16 2004 - 13:29:11 CDT
In <Pine.LNX.4.53.0404140940300.30260@a.shell.peak.org> John Stanley <stanley@peak.org> writes:
>It's not as if you don't have to keep a copy up-to-date -- that's your
>job as editor. Why you repeatedly refuse to keep the public copy up to
>date is a mystery. I can only assume you enjoy being able to tell people
>"that's not what the current version says".
No, I do not keep an up-tp-date copy of the full draft. It is scattered
amongst various files in nroff format, and I can generate clean copies of
individual sections or paragraphs on the fly as required. Producing a
complete draft is hard work. Not that it is hard to produce the draft, but
there is a lot of work in altering file permissions to keep track of where
I am at, producing a full set of diffs (and removing from it "changes"
which are mere artefacts of the pagination), uploading it to the website
and altering the index page to match.
And there is no point in doing all that every five minutes during a
discussion on one particular feature of the draft, where the text is
changing continually, where the effects are confined to one section, and
where that section can easily be published to the list as I have just
done.
The ONLY significant changes to the draft as published last November are,
apart from typos, broken cross-references, collected syntax, and the like
are:
1. The Followup text we are discussing.
2. The changes resulting from Graham Klyne's header registry, as recently
published here.
3. The implementation of Injection-Date, which I am about to post.
When all those three have stabilised, then a freash full draft would
clearly be in order.
>>My latest text has now been published, and two people have responded to
>>it.
>You've distributed an extract from one small section, but not provided an
>updated copy of the draft for months. You know this is an issue.
I have published the full text of the section on the duties of a followup
agent. That text contains everything needed regarding the present
discussions regarding back references. Nothing elswhere in the draft that
is relevant to that issue has changed since the last full draft. In
particular, none of the sections referred to in that text has changed.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5