I’d like to see Alex’ response on how much it would cost and some estimation on how easy it would then be to maintain. I completely agree with Martin that the main motivation is to support older oXygen versions (which is common with our users, AFAIK). Finally, I think that money would be wisely spent, i.e. it shouldn’t be much but plenty of people will benefit (saying this without knowing any statistics …). Best Peter

Am 12.10.2018 um 18:02 schrieb James Cummings :

I'm increasingly of the opinion that our provision of the oxygen-tei framework is an optional extra and that it should just keep pace with the current version of the TEI and the current release of oXygen. If changes in oXygen mean that older version of it are no longer supported, so be it. I say that as someone who now doesn't have an institutional subscription to oXygen. I'm not saying that is the fairest or best decision for overall impact and outreach, but it might be the easiest in terms of managing our meagre time resources. Willing to be convinced to change my mind though. ;-)

James

-- Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk mailto:James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics, Newcastle University From: Tei-council on behalf of Martin Holmes Sent: 12 October 2018 16:20:34 To: s.bauman@northeastern.edu; TEI Council Subject: Re: [Tei-council] thinking about oXygen

The ticket Alex raised has all the details:

<https://github.com/TEIC/oxygen-tei/issues/27 https://github.com/TEIC/oxygen-tei/issues/27>

I don't think I can explain it any better than that. My sense is that we're basically faced with:

1. Abandoning support for older versions of Oxygen in order to provide a fully-working interface with support for all the new features in the Oxygen interface in current versions.

2. Creating special tags for every version of Oxygen in which new features are introduced, and building a separate version of the plugin for each of those tags every time we build, with every build requiring the use of its own version of the oxygen.jar file.

I don't like either of these options, frankly. #1 is bad because the only reason for maintaining the plugin at all is that people with older versions of Oxygen can keep their TEI and Stylesheets code up to date. #2 is a potential nightmare from the maintenance and bugfixing point of view. What happens if one particular version fails to build? Do we release all the other versions and not that one, or do we hold them all back till the bug is fixed?

But the main problem is that we no longer have anyone with any expertise regarding the Oxygen plugin. A few years ago I taught myself enough about it to write a build file to create the various versions we currently maintain (the stable one, the bleeding-edge one, and the release one). I don't remember enough to feel confident about doing any of this work right now, and I don't have time to re-learn what I used to know (which probably wasn't enough anyway). Really, we need two or three people to take a deep dive into this and take responsibility for it. At the Council meeting, though, I think Magda was tasked with asking Alex if he would do the initial setup for us as a paid job.

Cheers, Martin

On 2018-10-11 09:29 AM, Syd Bauman wrote:

...

First, hope Michael didn't beat you up too badly, Sarah.

Back in late Sep when we did a Stylesheets release we agreed to defer a release of the oXygen plug-in for a bit. So we probably need to have a discussion about what we are going to do.

As a reminder, the results of this summer's survey on oXygen usage is:

| count majorVersion | ----- ------------ | 12 17 | 6 18 | 2 16 | 2 14 | 1 20 | 1 15 | 1 19

And of the 5 people using versions 16 or older, 2 or 3 of 'em hope we continue to support the older version.

Could Martin or James or someone else who understands this better than I do kick off the discussion with a summary of the problem(s)?

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