[iaufwg] Registering the FOREIGN extension name

[Robert Hanisch]

I suppose we should have expected one of these conventions to open up some
latent cans of worms!

First, regarding the status of the FOREIGN extension used at NOAO, it seems
to me that this fits into the currently defined status of 'L' -- a local
FITS extension.  It is not clear to me what "has a limited scope only" is
supposed to convey -- limited to within that organization?  limited in
capabilities?  But anyway, I guess I do not see anything significantly
different between L status and Bill's proposed C status, since I don't think
we should be concerning ourselves with non-conforming extensions.

Is it implicit that status of D and L also implies status of R, i.e., that
the name is reserved?  Perhaps the status flag has to carry two pieces of
information, such as RL or RD.  Again, FOREIGN was being used for some time,
and the name was never reserved.

I don't think it is a good idea to drop the D status.  How are proposals
supposed to rise to the level of a standard if they do not appear as drafts?
This would basically force all extensions to be developed in private, like
FOREIGN, and then be accepted somehow after the fact.  This is what we are
doing now, in order to deal with the historical backlog, but it is not the
best way of working.

Thus, I would suggest the following status levels, in increasing level of
acceptance/recognition.

R       Reserved.  A document and implementations may or may not exist.
C       Conforming but not widely used or recognized beyond a single
         organization or software system.
CR     C, and the name has been Reserved.
D       Draft (Reserved name is implicit).
S       Standard.

In this scheme, FOREIGN would have been C, unless Bill has accepted a
request from NOAO for the name to be reserved, in which case it would be CR.
Now that Bill has asked us to consider FOREIGN for formal inclusion in the
registry, it should be promoted to D.

That said, I think there are enough ambiguities in the document describing
FOREIGN that it is not ready to go to S.

Cheers,
Bob

(I see that Lucio and I were puzzling over all this at the same time!)