Initiating ENs

[msdemlei]

The current text is not very clear as to how to initiate the EN process, and it can be read that a future EN should first be published as a Note. In practice, this would have been clumsy, and thus, most ENs started their life as a PEN; I think we should make clear that this is legal, with or without a following RFC.

[pdowler]

I am a little wary here because I have heard people casually say "let's write an endorsed note" which I find philosophically wrong for several reasons. The main one is that the author(s) write a note and someone else (TCG) endorses it so conciously starting at PEN seems kind of wrong in principle (even if it is what happens in practice).

The second reason I don't like hearing that is that it seems to sound like it is motivated by "this will be easier/faster than a creating/updating a standard and the RFC process" rather than by EN being more appropriate than a standard. I would not want to encourage/sanction that and would rather solve the real problem: WD->PR->REC is too painful.

So, I just think we should be cautious about how we explain the EN process.

[msdemlei]

On Mon, May 12, 2025 at 08:46:43PM +0000, Patrick Dowler wrote: pdowler left a comment (ivoa-std/DocStd#1) So, I just think we should be cautious about how we explain the EN process.

Frankly, I've increasingly viewed ENs as "RECs that don't quite fit our REC model". The versioning policies need to be normative, but what WG would it belong to? The DDC note... well, describes a practice, which isn't quite what we do RECs for, but it's still stuff that people need to be able to rely on. The UCDs... well, they shouldn't be an EN, true. The UDF catalogue... could be a DAL REC just as well; I don't quite remember why we decided to go EN with it. The UAT-vocabulary note... could be a Semantics REC, but VocInVO2 sees ENs here. In the end, if you do an RFC, an EN is quite as much work as a REC is, at least to the editors (the TCG chair probably feels different here:-), and they haven't been faster either in consequence. So, I'd probably change the story on why we have ENs in the first place.