DisCo: Generating A Disposition-of-Comments Document from Tracker

Editors:

Ben Adida, Creative Commons ben@adida.net

Copyright © 2007 W3C^® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply.

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Overview

DisCo automatically generates a summary of how issues were handled, in the form of a document suitable for a W3C Transition Call. The steps are

• Add appropriate annotations to Tracker Issues
• Obtain an XML dump of the issues from the Tracker
• Tweak the DisCo XSLT to fit the desired introductory text
• Add the XSLT instruction to the XML dump

Add DisCo Annotations

For an issue to be picked up by DisCo, its title must start with a common prefix followed by a colon, then any suffix. For example, if one is generating a disposition of comments for last call, all issues should be named "Last Call Comment: ..."

In addition, four notes should be added to an issue:

• "ACTION: " followed by either "Reject" or "Accept" depending on how the comment was handled.
• "CHANGE-TYPE: " followed by either None, Editorial, or Substantive.
• "RESOLUTION: " followed by the text of the working group's resolution.
• "COMMENTER-RESPONSE: " followed by "Reject" or "Accept" depending on how the commenter reacted to the resolution.

Here is a sample issue.

Obtain XML dump from Tracker

Given a Tracker URL http://example.com/track/, get the XML dump is available at http://example.com/track/api/dump

Tweak DisCo XSLT

The DisCo XSLT for RDFa CR is available here. It should probably be tweaked for your needs, in particular the top-level variables:

<xsl:variable name="worktitle">RDFa in XHTML 1.1</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="stage">CR</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="productnum">2</xsl:variable>
        

productnum is the ID of the "Product" in the Tracker for which this Disposition of Comments is being generated.

Add XSLT Instruction

Once the XML downloaded from the Tracker, the following lines should be added at the top:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="disco.xsl"?>     

Wrap It Up

The resulting XML file can be delivered straight to the browser, which will apply the XSLT transform. Of course, if there are a lot of issues, it may be worth pre-generating the HTML:

xsltproc disco.xsl issues.xml