[DDI-users] A "home" for the DDI

[ddi-users@icpsr.umich.edu]

Hi Mark,

The following is my own opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of 
my employer.

While I agree with the overall goal of greater transparency in the DDI 
development process, I question whether Sourceforge and/or CVS are the means to 
achieve it.

CVS is a version control system. It solves the problem of managing and tracking 
changes when  multiple parties are working on a single project. That is a 
common problem of large software development projects, and that is a problem 
that SourceForge has tackled successfully.

SourceForge & CVS are tools that have been used to successfully manage software 
development. However, to say that these tools may therefore be used to 
successfuly manage DDI development is to make an erroneous analogy. The DDI is 
a standard, not software, and standards development has different kinds of 
problems from software development. 

The DDI development process suffers from a number of problems, but it does not 
suffering from having too many versions of the DDI being worked on by too many 
parties. There are only a total of 7 versions of the DTD and all changes have 
to go through the DDI Council -- this is not the kind of problem which CVS is 
good at solving. If you look at major standards organizations such as W3C, 
IEEE, or JCP, I don't think you'll find any of their standards projects on 
SourceForge because it's just a vastly different kind of process from software 
development. 

Nor do I think does inclusion within SourceForge automatically guarantee 
transparency to the development process. For example, taking the VDC project at 
SourceForge that you mentioned, the last feature request was in August of 2002, 
the only closed bug reports occurred in 2001, and the download packages RPMS 
and Saxon Exchanges contain no README files to explain what they are for. While 
the CVS source tree for the project does contain much source code, the project 
itself seems pretty opaque to an outsider like me.

In conclusion, it just seems to me that CVS/SourceForge is the right tool for 
the wrong problem.

P.S. In the middle of writing this, I came to the realization that what may 
have prompted your message was that the older versions of the DDI DTD do not 
appear on the revised DDI site. After asking around, I found out that the older 
versions are available, only not obviously so. On the Users Information >> 
DDI/Schema >> page, there is a link "Archival DTDs" that takes you to the older 
versions of the DTD. I've asked them to make that link more prominent.

I-Lin Kuo
Programmer/Analyst, ICPSR