[iaufwg] FITS voting procedure

[William Pence]

Dear IAU FITS Working Group members,

As previously announced, I am planning to issue the call for votes on 
approving the new draft FITS Standard document on Wednesday, April 30th. 
  When casting your vote, please keep in mind that we are only formally 
voting on the the main body of the document, not the appendices.  The 
appendices are provided for informational purposes only and are not 
officially endorsed or approved by the IAU FWG.

This distinction is relevant in light of recent discussions by the 
executive members of the FWG (i.e., the current and past officers of the 
FWG, and the regional committee chairmen) on how to satisfy Mark 
Calabretta's request to document previous changes to FITS requirements. 
As a result of these discussions, a new Appendix H has been added to the 
draft Standard document that lists 5 known instances where the 
requirements in the Standard are more strict than in the original 
published FITS papers (i.e., dealing with allowed characters in a 
keyword name, the slash between value and comment, arrays of values on a 
keyword record, fixed format for complex keywords, and restrictions on 
the use of the SIMPLE and XTENSION keywords.  A short footnote has been 
added to each relevant section of the main document, referring the 
reader to this appendix for details about the previous change.  This new 
version of the document, labeled version 3.0c, dated 2008 April 28, is 
now available at http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_draft.html.

Some of you may have further comments or suggestions to make about this 
new appendix, but if at all possible, please refrain from posting any 
comments until after we finish the formal vote on the main part of the 
document.  It is important that we conclude the formal approval process 
soon, and I'd rather that we not get distracted by any issues that are 
not directly relevant to the formal vote.  After the vote, assuming the 
document is approved,  I will specifically call for any further comments 
or suggestions regarding the appendices before we publicly release the 
new document.  We can deal with any remaining issues regarding the 
appendices at that time with simple majority votes, if necessary.

regards,
Bill
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence                       William.Pence at nasa.gov
NASA/GSFC Code 662       HEASARC        +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771                      +1-301-286-1684 (fax)