Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!dino!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!hirchert
From: hirchert@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: FIRST public review - response fina
Message-ID: <6800003@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 19 Dec 89 17:30:26 GMT
References: <14164@lambda.UUCP>
Lines: 58
Nf-ID: #R:lambda.UUCP:14164:ux1.cso.uiuc.edu:6800003:000:3404
Nf-From: ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!hirchert    Dec 19 11:02:00 1989


1. Several additional examples have been provided of public comment responses
   that were mailed later than the date on their cover letter.  Now I know that
   the people doing the physical preparation of these letters discussed
   postdating the letters to avoid this problem, and I know that the letters
   were in fact produced postdated, but apparently the time period allowed was
   not long enough to allow for everything that had to be done prior to
   mailing.  Apparently the dating problem was more general than I realized
   (although apparently not generally as bad as the 10 days that J Giles
   experienced).  I still believe that there was no systematic intent to deny
   commentors their right of appeal.

   (By the way, when we are talking about public comments that are so large it
   takes the technical committee more than a year to respond to them, I think
   15 day limit on protests is a bit silly, that's ANSI's rule and X3J3 has
   no control over it.)

2. Presley Smith (psmith@mozart.uucp) writes
>In fact, the rules called the SD-2, are fairly clear that all letters are
>supposed to be sent prior to the start of the next review and that the 
>negatives are to be addressed with the commenters before the start of 
>the next review by response to those commentors.  That is all part of 
>milestone 14 which must be completed before the return to milestone 12
>which is another public review cycle. 

   As Presley well knows, this is what X3J3 believed to be true and the goal it
   attempted (unsuccessfully) to meet.  When X3J3 inquired whether it was
   necessary to send out the responses before forwarding a revised draft for
   the second public comment period, they were told that it was not and that
   all that was required was that X3J3 approve the responses before the next
   review, not that they actually be mailed by then.  In other words, the
   rules in SD-2 are not quite as clear as Presley is suggesting.
   Nevertheless, X3J3 has been revising its internal procedures for handling
   public comment to try to make certain that the kinds of delays that occurred
   in the sending of the responses to the first rounds do _not_ occur in the
   handling of the second round of comments.

3. Presley also says
>On an appeal or protest, you will get a much higher level of attention
>that what you get with the public review letter.  The management groups
>of the standards processes work the protests and appeals.

   Maybe so, but so far all they have done is send us the protest letters
   through the same channels they send us regular and late second round
   comments.  So far X3J3 has been given no special instructions for 
   handling these letters, and so they have been put into the same process
   as the second round comments.  (The people involved in that process _have_
   been asked to take special care in processing the protest letters, but
   that's as far as it goes (as of now).)  Thus, it may be that the management
   groups intend to monitor X3J3's handling of these letters more closely, but
   that has had no immediate effect on how they will be handled technically.

I suppose that since it is probably more than 15 days after even the last of
the first round comments should have been received, this may be a moot issue
by now, anyway.

Kurt W. Hirchert     hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu
National Center for Supercomputing Applications