Subcommittee C constitution

[Daphne Preston-Kendal]

Hello all,

(Using a different email address in the hope it will work around the
problem with my messages not being delivered to the list. Please
continue to use <d...@nonceword.org> for personal communication with
me.)

I’d like to thank John for accepting me as chair of the Cleanup
subcommittee. Here is a proposal on the procedural aspects of how
committee C will work, at least at the beginning:

1. Initial activity

Initially, subcommittee C will concentrate on cleanup of the libraries
already adopted by WG2 up to and including the Yellow Edition with
respect to each other, and to the small language.

Cleanup of the small language with respect to itself is initially left
to committee F (Foundation). How we will go about cleanup of proposals
adopted in future by committees F (Foundation), B (Batteries), and E
(Environment) will be decided once those committees actually get
underway.

2. Membership

Subcommittee C has open membership. Any member of WG2 may take part in
its activities. Participation from those active in other subcommittees
is highly encouraged.

3. Procedure

I expect that the majority of issues considered by subcommittee C
(though not all, for which see below) will have clear and
uncontroversial resolutions. Therefore the majority of issues will be
resolved by consent docket: the chair (that’s me) will propose a
solution, making provision where possible for backwards-compatible
transition of programs which use any deprecated forms; as long as
nobody objects before a certain date, the proposed solution will be
automatically adopted into R7RS Large.

For issues with no immediately clear and easy resolution (in the view
of the chair), the WG2 issue tracker (to be established) will be used
to gather proposals and input from Scheme users and implementers. If a
clear consensus emerges for one solution, that solution may be put on
the next consent docket; otherwise it may go to a vote.

The ballots with consent issues whose proposed solutions were objected
to, or for which no, will be sent out after the close of issues on the
corresponding consent dockets. The ballots will be named after
non-fatal engineering disasters caused by inconsistencies. The first
ballot will therefore be the Mars Climate Orbiter ballot; the next one
may be called the Hubble Telescope Mirror ballot. I would be
entertained to hear suggestions for future names by private mail —
especially if they come from somewhere other than NASA.

The initial committee C consent docket is open until the end of 2022
and new issues may be added to it if raised before the end of August
2022. Its initial contents can provisionally be read here:
<https://gitlab.com/dpk/presrfis/-/blob/master/cleanup-consent-docket.org>
but this will be moved to the WG2 central repository when it opens.

Until work begins on the final specification documents for R7RS Large,
any agreed-on changes in the R7RS versions of libraries compared to
the original SRFI/R(n < 7)RS versions will be kept in a central
document for the eventual editor(s) of the R7RS Large specs to use.

--
dpk (Daphne Preston-Kendal) ·· 12107 Berlin, Germany ·· http://dpk.io/
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