Open frivoal opened 2 months ago
The Revising W3C Process CG just discussed #861
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TL;DR: We've been here before
Some history (and some pointers for archaeologists)
In re-establishing work on the process document, during the hiatus between work being abandoned around 2007 and taking up a new effort half a decade later, the drafts I proposed (There was a public record for about half a year by then) did not have the PR phase - much as you are proposing now.
It was reinstated starting on 2014-02-05...
The issue was managed in Tracker as ISSUE-77, and you can follow the [CG email archives]() for a substantial amount of the discussion (I don't recall exactly when the AB agreed to have at least some of the discussion in public, maybe around mid 2013...)
Thanks @chaals. For anyone else looking into this, here the state of that historical draft right before Proposed Recommendation was reinstated: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2024May/att-0001/tr.html, extracted from the mercurial repository.
At first glance, there appears to be a significant difference between that and what I'm proposing now: the earlier attempt seemed to move from CR to REC once the transition request was successful, but prior to the AC Review. The REC was then marked as provisional, and the AC review was conducted on the basis of that document. Then, somehow (asking how was part of what led to PR being reinstated), if the AC review is successful the REC then becomes no longer provisional. Part of the pushback, as I understand it, was that this provisional REC was not all that different from a Proposed REC, and that in that case we might as well keep the familiar name and the explicitly documented transitions.
Here, I'm proposing that we keep the spec at CR until all conditions to be a REC are met (including AC Review), so there's no transitional or provisional state. It'll be clearer once as I post a Pull Request, which I intend to do shortly.
Yeah, the approach to a new process went through some iteration, but the goal was actually the same.
It might be worth skimming the discussion, but I suspect not much changes, except if we have a simpler process to get more Recomendations there are people like me who will be pleased, and people who seem to think we shouldn't consider it a goal to publish Recommendations, who will not be pleased by any progress toward that goal.
first take available at https://github.com/w3c/w3process/pull/868
Unlike (FP)WD, CR(S or D), and RECs, Proposed Recommendations aren't long-lived stages on the Recommendation track.
They only exist for the purpose of supporting an AC Review about the transition from CR to REC. The Process explicitly disallows making substantive changes to Proposed RECs, and you need to cycle through more CRs (or WDs) if you want to change things.
It seems to me that we could do away with Proposed RECs, while keeping the associated AC Review. It would just apply to a CR instead of a PR. We'd still have an "AC Review to propose advancement to Recommendation", and it would still apply to a CR that has satisfied all the criteria for advancement, but we wouldn't need a distinct publication.
We have done similar things before:
This would allow us:
Also, while I suppose we could deal with these two independently, I think it would make sense to also look into a similar merger of candidate ammendments with proposed amendments. This could be part of the simplification of .3.11.5. Incorporating Candidate Amendments requested in issues like #590, #589, or #700