[Matroska-devel] mkv standardization and documentation

[wm4]

On Tue, 21 Apr 2015 16:43:39 +0200
Moritz Bunkus <moritz at bunkus.org> wrote:

> Hey,
> 
> > …it seems that the RFC EBML draft is unofficial…
> 
> Correct.
> 
> > There is a lot of significant description about EBML that only appears
> > in the RFC draft, and it would be great to incorporate this
> > information into the main specification prior to IETF submission.
> 
> Definitely. Finishing the RFC or fleshing out the specs is very much
> wanted.
> 
> > What would be the best method for considering this content for
> > inclusion into the main specification? Can I open tickets for selected
> > passages?
> 
> Hmm. Traditionally all _discussion_ about the EBML and Matroska
> specification took place here on this list (and for smaller, not so
> relevant parts on IRC). I'd rather keep it that way – not because I
> think that mailing lists are that much superior to GitHub but in order
> not to spread it out over too many sites.
> 
> However, if it's only about including certain parts then pull requests
> are probably the best things to have.
> 
> And for pull requests we would need to include the RFC in the Foundation
> repository[3]which it currently isn't. Which leads us directly to the
> next question:

The spec should be completely separate from the source code of these
utilities. The source code should not be normative either.

> > Additionally, I noticed that the RFC EBML draft found at
> > http://matroska.org/technical/specs/rfc/index.html appears to be under
> > copyright. Did Nilsson give Matroska permission to distribute/build upon
> > this draft?
> 
> Not that I remember. That discussion took place in February and March of
> 2004 (!) [1][2].
> 
> I'd suggest the following:
> 
> - We contact Martin Nilsson and ask him to either assign the copyright
>   to the Matroska organization (Steve Lhomme has created a French not
>   for profit organization) or to place that RFC draft under a permissive
>   license.
> 
> - If he agrees we import the RFC as it is into the Foundation git
>   repo[3].
> 
> - Discussion about the RFC should take place on this list.
> 
> - Requests for changes in either the EBML specs of the RFC should be
>   posted as pull requests or issues on the Foundation repo via Github.
> 
> How does that sound?
> 
> Kind regards,
> mosu
> 
> [1] http://lists.matroska.org/pipermail/matroska-devel/2004-February/thread.html
> [2] http://lists.matroska.org/pipermail/matroska-devel/2004-March/thread.html
> [3] https://github.com/Matroska-Org/foundation-source