[om] Concatenation of lists ??

[Mike Dewar]

Dear Michael,

I agree 100% that we need to get more people involved in developing the
CDs, however I'm not convinced that this kind of approach is the answer.
Having said that there is no need for a single development model for
all CDs, individual groups can adopt whatever mechanism they wish to use
and if one proves significantly better than the others then natural
selection ought to take over :-)

Developing CDs is quite a subtle process and our experience is that you
need to have somebody who is clearly in charge: not so much a maintainer 
as an editor.  An apparently minor and sensible change to the semantics of
a symbol can potentially invalidate dozens of FMPs, examples etc., and it
is hard to imagine tools which can help spot this automatically.

I'm a big advocate of CVS and in fact introduced it into NAG (where it is
now used throughout the company), but I don't believe its a "magic bullet".
One only has to look at the Mozilla project to see how harmful allowing it
to define a project structure can be.  There are other technologies such
as egroup-style message boards which could also be useful, and maybe we need
to support such things on the openmath.org website.

The important point is that the role of the OpenMath Society is to check and
then adopt CDs, but anybody can develop CDs in any way they wish.  We should
have an open discussion about what is the best infrastructure to set up
(which should be as flexible and informal as possible) and then let people
get on with it.  I'm open to suggestions and in theory would be happy to
implement them on the openmath.org site (although as this is in Florida
and I am in Oxford its difficult, but I don't see this as a long-term
arrangement).

Thanks for your suggestion, what do other people think?

Mike.

On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 11:54:41AM -0400, Michael Kohlhase wrote:
> Dear James, dear all,
> 
> seeing the activity and interst on OpenMath CDs, I think that it would be
> time to change the development model for content dictionaries. 
> 
> There seem to be people out there who really want to use/extend them.  
> 
> I propose to put up the CDs for anonymous cvs, assign some maintainer for
> each of them and see how they evolve.  This would be much simpler than
> mailing every proposed change to David or you. I know that this has been
> proposed before, but nothing happened except for people giving positive
> feedback to the idea.
> 
> I think that now is the time to start developing the CDs, since they are
> the key resource that distinguish OpenMath from other approaches like
> content MathML.
> 
> One relatively simple way of implementing this would be to define a project
> at sourceforge.net. Alternatively I could offer to put up some space and a
> "system/product" in the buzilla at mathweb.org. Maybe we only want to adopt
> this approach for the non-core cds. 
> 
>      Michael
> 
> 
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