Hello everyone,
As Charlotte and Jesper pointed out at the last TC, the release process for new HICDEP versions is currently undocumented. I'm about to change that, here's what I came up so far:
roughly every year, the following happens:
- 4 weeks before a WP4 TC, I post a message to the discussion board stating that the version currently visible in the wiki is now considered a candidate for release as-is
- WP4 members forward the message to any data managers or researches they know who might have valuable feedback
- Within the first 3 weeks, everybody (including external parties) may comment and changes are still possible
- A week before the TC, the wiki pages are frozen
- at the TC, we discuss any issues and in the decide to release the current version or not
- If accepted, I perform a version bump, mark the version as stable, produce a downloadable PDF and create a new set of wiki pages for the next draft version. The changes from the last stable version to the current stable are outlined in the ChangeLog
Are you all fine with this? I think the extra look by external parties is quite a critical step... Do you think 3 weeks is too long/too short to get actual feedback? If noone objects, I will document this process on the HICDEP homepage a bit more formally in a week or so.
Kind regards,
Simon