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niemopen / ntac-admin

The NTAC is a NIEMOpen Technical Steering Committee, responsible for the NIEM technical architecture. This repo contains its meeting minutes and discussion papers.
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Publication Process: Cycles #11

Closed cabralje closed 1 year ago

cabralje commented 1 year ago

Comments from Duncan Sparrell:

Cycles is the term I am using for the 3-year period with one major and two minor NIEM releases. The document implies that NIEM 1-5 all worked on 3 year cycle referred to. As I mentioned in a separate thread, I think this document should focus on the future and not mention how it was done in the past, and a separate document should have the history. In that separate document, as someone not previously involved, it would help me if it just listed the historical releases with a date next to each.

I do think it would be useful to propose the 3 year cycle for NIEM 6, 6.1,6.2, 7, …but I propose it be for planning purposes and we recognize there may be overlaps and it might not be as monolithic in the future. My perception is that NIEM has been more “waterfall’ and I happen to be an advocate for a more agile approach. NIEM 6 is probably not the time to become more agile, but you might allow for it in the future. Two topics in particular might affect this. It is desired that parts of NIEM actually become standards – but parts will remain software. That is the advantage of an OASIS Open project – allowing you to follow both paths. It is possible to keep all the pieceparts on a monolithic schedule, but it may be advantageous at some point for different parts to evolve at different rates – particularly the software vs the standards, but even within each of them. The second point is NIEM does not follow the semantic versioning standard. Note most software and most standards do follow semantic versioning. NIEM follows in concept, but not in detail (eg “supplements” are really “minor versions” - although it may be a misunderstanding on my part). Should you switch to semantic versioning, the big picture ‘group’ might still roughly follow the 3 year cycle – but the individual pieceparts might all have different numbers in detail. Some projects handle this by having a separate overarching document that all it has in it are the links to the right versions of all the other documents – so all that matters is the version of that overarching document (eg it could be “6.1” even though one of the subtending docs was “22.5.2”).

I am not saying to do any of this yet. I’m just saying allow that it might happen in the future and not get too prescriptive beyond 6.0.

cabralje commented 1 year ago

The initial working draft of the Publication Process only includes "major versions", "minor versions" and "errata". I believe that addresses your concerns about versioning.

The only statement about schedule is the following the top of Section 2 (Versions): NIEM versions will typically be published annually on a 3-year cycle. A NIEM major version one year will be followed by minor versions the next two years.

I believe this respects the current expectations about schedule (at least for version 6) while leaving us flexibility for the future. If we do eventually decide to abandon the expectation of an annual version or a 3 year cycle, we only need to change this one line.