[ncc-services-wg] Update regarding the proposals to improve the technical infrastructure supporting the RIPE Policy Development Process

* Richard Hartmann

> * There is no way to ensure that what authors send in is exactly, i.e.
> no more, no less, what makes it into new versions.
> * There is no canonical way to keep an up to date local copy of all documents

+1, and also to the problem statement itself.

I've got recent experience with the first point you mention in
particular, as changes I request going into a new version of a proposal
got ever so slightly changed - not in a significant way (a word going
away here, "the" turning into "their" there, ...), and I have no reason
to believe it was intentional or anything like that - but it's very hard
to spot with the current lack of tools. That it is possible for these
bugs to sneak in in the first place is also a tell-tale sign that the
tools aren't good enough - I'm suspecting manual transcribing from
e-mails to internal work documents is what's going on here.

So assuming we get C in order first: All the points under B, the two
additional points above, plus the third point under A, could all be
solved in one fell swoop by using a proper version control system. It
would be super nice to be able to clone the ripe-document-store repo,
make a proposal branch, work on it and finally tag MyProp v1, push to
the PDO, merging in any other unrelated proposals from the main branch
as they get accepted, repeat, until (hopefully) merging back to the main
branch....but I guess I'm not supposed to define solutions at this
point, so I'll stop there. ;-)

Tore