J3/16-230r1 To: J3 From: Anton Shterenlikht Subject: Automation of J3 work Date: 2016 June 08 Justification: J3 work is made unnecessarily tedious by willful rejection of capabilities in automatic computer tools, specifically created for collaborative document work. Proposal: - The version control (svn?) should have (might already be set up this way?) branches, head and tags. - All members of the committee (J3 and WG5) have commit access to branches, and read access to head and tags. - Only the editor has commit access to head and tags. (The editor is a single point of failure, so I don't like it, but given that it's a big change already, this will do for now). - Some time prior to the coming meeting the editor makes a new branch from head. - All committee members commit their changes to this branch. - The editor can review each commit as it comes in, and accept/reject at this stage. Other members of the committee can review and comment on the mailing list as well. There is a ample space for justification discussion in the commit message. - At the meeting (or immediately before the meeting), the editor merges the branch to head and creates a single diff for review at the meeting. - A the meeting the committee members review this diff and commit changes directly to head. Unacceptable bits of the diff can simply be discarded. - After each commit the draft PDF is automatically rebuilt and is available to all for review. - At the end of the meeting, the editor produces a final draft edit for this meeting, and spawns a new branch from this edit. Benefits: - regex ops will be much easier (faster) if src were available to all. Examples: where does "cooperative synchronization" first appears in the standard or TS. Much harder to search for this in PDF. - Low likelihood of conflict between different commits. - Much less manual work. - Complete text will be much easier to see. - No copy/paste - ever.