Re: [tei-council] A decision we have to take on oxygen-tei

I wonder if it would be so difficult? I’d imagine having several branches, i.e „14+“, „15+“ which would only be updated with the latest TEI schemas and stylesheets. The (new) dev branch would be the bleeding edge (as usual) with all updates from the oxygen people and from us. Creating the „14+“ etc. branch would only need to copy the old oXygen jars from a past release over the new ones (I hope). The thing I’m unsure about is whether we need different update locations for every branch or if could all be served from one descriptor file? Best Peter

Am 09.11.2015 um 23:21 schrieb Martin Holmes :

We've let this discussion drop without reaching a consensus, and I don't think we can afford to do that. To summarize: Lou and I think it might be time to drop the TEI plugin; Peter and James think the plugin ought to take on a new role, which is providing support for updating P5 and the Stylesheets in older versions of Oxygen. I think the latter would be noble but very difficult to manage.

Cheers, Martin

On 15-10-30 04:42 AM, Martin Holmes wrote:

...

Hi James,

I did talk to George and Alex about this. Your suggestion (and Peter's) that our role should be to maintain support for older versions is a bit problematic because we are also taking advantage of newer features to enhance our plugin; and the Oxygen guys are contributing to our framework too. We're basically talking about having two distinct development trees which will progressively diverge. And there's no easy way to choose which versions we intend to support.

Cheers, Martin

On 2015-10-30 12:25 PM, James Cummings wrote:

...

I think users who want to stay with stability of a known release would just not update it, right? This happened before and we continued to support oxygen-tei. If we release a version of the plugin that only works with 17.1+ is there a way in the updateSite file to indicate that? i.e. your oXygen won't download it if you are still running version 15? Or is there a way to have the framework and new TEI but not include anything that breaks old versions?

The general reason people like that we produce this framework is that they can stay with $outDatedOXygen and get $newTEITags. If we don't release this, then we'd be forcing those people to update their oXygen in order to get new TEI... right? Or am I misunderstanding. I don't want to put those users at a disadvantage (since mostly these are slow-moving institution-based users whose institutions only upgrade their provided oXygen every few versions).

I think we should examine the options more closely and not make a snap decision.

Maybe we could ask the oXygen folks about it since they are here at #TEI2015?

-James

On 30/10/15 11:11, Lou Burnard wrote:

...

I agree with Martin's recommendation. Wonderful though it is, oXygen and the oXygen folks are both, it doesn't look right for the TEI to be doing their job of keeping their customers up to date. After all, there may well be oXygen users who'd prefer the stability of known release.

On 30/10/15 09:32, Martin Holmes wrote:

...

We're faced with a rather difficult decision with regard to the oxygen-tei plugin.

The Oxygen guys have introduced a lot of new features, especially relating to CSS usage in Author mode (as far as I understand it), and they've made a point of using jTEI as one of their examples. However, their new stuff only works on Oxygen 17.1. They've put it in a branch on oxygen-tei:

https://github.com/TEIC/oxygen-tei/tree/update_oxygen_17_1

Our plugin currently works on versions going back to 15.2. If we merge these exciting new changes, then people using older versions of Oxygen will suddenly get an update that breaks or won't install (I don't know exactly what will happen). However, if we don't update, we'll be in the rather odd situation that Oxygen's release will always be more advanced than our version of our plugin, which makes our plugin sort of pointless, since the main reason for it is to exist is to enable users to get a more up-to-the-minute version of the plugin.

I'm tempted to say that it might be time to retire our "official" TEI release of the plugin entirely. We could offer a bleeding-edge preview release of the plugin, based on our dev branches, which we would us for testing and would encourage savvy users with a need to get the absolute latest-and-greatest to install; but otherwise we would just rely on Oxygen's steady release cycle to keep the majority of our users up to date. That would mean a brief lag between the time that we do a major release and Oxygen does, when users of Oxygen would have no easy way to get the latest-and-greatest P5 and Stylesheets. But it would make our lives simpler.

Cheers, Martin

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