From: <mcalabre_at_email.protected>
Date: Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:32:38 +1100

<pre id="body">
<a name="start" accesskey="j" id="start"></a>On Mon 2007/12/03 18:20:11 CDT, William Pence wrote
in a message to: IAU-FWG <iaufwg_at_nrao.<!--nospam-->edu>
>I would now like to call on the chairmen of the 4 regional FITS
>committees to conduct a review and vote on the proposed new FITS
>standard document. As a reminder to everyone, the 4 committees and
  :
>In addition to this overall vote on the proposed changes, the committees
>may also submit comments or suggestions for improving the new Standard
>document. The IAU FWG will consider these comments during its final
>review of the document.
Greetings,
The Aus/NZ regional FITS committee has endorsed the FITS 3.0a spec
with the following vote:
         Yes: 5
          No: 1
     Abstain: 0
  Non-voting: 0
Reasons for the 'no' vote are appended.
Mark Calabretta
Chairman, AusFITS
>>>
In the past, one 'no' vote would have defeated a FITS proposal. A
dialogue was therefore conducted to obtain a consensus before the
vote, which thus became a formality.
With this proposal the process has been greatly streamlined but at
the expense of becoming somewhat magisterial in tone: submissions
were taken and what amounted to 'verdicts' on each were presented
by the technical committee, with reasons but mostly without having
entered into any form of dialogue. We were then pressed to a vote
from the regional committees with a reminder of the allowed budget
of dissenting votes.
Specifically, I made the point that if "once FITS always FITS" is to
mean anything, then the FITS spec must contain enough information
about its own history to allow new FITS readers to interpret old
FITS files (I had, in fact, been caught out by incompatible
changes in writing several WCSLIB header parsers):
http://listmgr.cv.nrao.edu/pipermail/fitsbits/2007-August/001954.html
The full text of the technical committee's verdict (basically, it's
too much work) is quoted in my response to it
http://listmgr.cv.nrao.edu/pipermail/iaufwg/2007-November/000647.html
But this response itself was elided at what should, with hindsight,
have been the "EC Review" step of the formal voting procedure - a
step intended to foster consensus:
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/iaufwg/iaufwg_rules.html
http://listmgr.cv.nrao.edu/pipermail/iaufwg/2007-November/000651.html
Notwithstanding the excellent work done by the technical committee
in revising the FITS spec, I am not satisfied with their response on
this issue, nor with the ratification process itself in this instance,
and consequently my only option is to vote against the spec as a
whole. This is a pity because it's generally a great improvement over
FITS 2.1 and the changes are documented better than ever before.
As far as I am aware, this is the first dissenting vote ever recorded
publically against a FITS proposal in 27 years and I have not cast it
lightly. I hope that the defect is rectified before the spec is
presented to the FWG.
Mark Calabretta
ATNF
Received on 2008-02-08 17:32:53