[iaufwg] INHERIT convention

[Clive Page]

Robert Hanisch wrote:

> repeat myself, but despite the caveats on the website, I believe that the
> presence of a convention in the FWG registry does convey a certain
> imprimatur.  There are a lot of things people can do that are legal FITS but
> bad ideas, and I don't think the FWG should recognize conventions simply
> because they do not break any rules.

Bob

I don't think that the existence of the FWG registry implies approval.  The main 
purpose was just to register the existence of each convention and document it in 
a location which everyone can find and use.  I imagine that there are two main 
ways that people will use the registry:

(a) If they encounter a FITS file which has used some convention it will make it 
easy for them to search for the documentation on it so that they can read it 
easily.

(b) If they want to write a FITS file and need to develop a convention for (say) 
some new data structure, they might think of searching the registry to see if 
e.g. someone has mapped that structure to FITS before.  They might then use the 
same convention, or perhaps, after reading the full gory details, they might 
invent something they think is better (and then register it, we hope).  At least 
they should be able to avoid inventing a new convention which clashes in some 
way with an existing one, e.g. using the same keywords to mean different things.

I'd have thought that both uses (a) and (b) are ones that we'd all want to 
support (but maybe you can think of reasons why not?)

The next question is whether each convention can be annotated in some way to 
mark it as either approved or deprecated (perhaps with reasons if the latter, 
e.g. superseded by some later convention).  That would also be a nice to have, 
but I don't think we have a mechanism for doing that at present.  Maybe a 
working group could be set up to do the approving, but it might not be easy to 
reach consensus on each convention.  It might also be politically difficult to 
deprecate a convention that is in active use by some small group of users.

Regards

-- 
Clive Page
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester,
Leicester, LE1 7RH,  U.K.