Proposal for setting goals for 2023

[aphillips]

The MessageFormat subcommittee should strive to build a specification that is as technically complete and correct with the highest level of consensus and acceptance as reasonable. This will help gain adoption and ensure the success of MFv2 as a standard.

However, timeliness is also important. In order to ensure progress and begin to develop an installed base, we need to set goals for ourselves for this year.

Unicode has two important schedule dates each year: one in the spring and one in the fall. The spring date is primarily a CLDR release. The fall date includes the new TUS version and attendant updates to ICU, Emoji, and a CLDR release.

We should consider whether there is any specific deliverable for the spring date (15 April), noting that this is pretty close to now, especially given the need for public review prior to the release.

The fall date is 15 September with a review date of 15 August. ICU releases generally a month or so behind TUS and CLDR (I can't find the ICU schedule anywhere: I observe this from past dates on the website, etc.). Working backwards from these dates, I propose the following tentative schedule:

15 July

• PRI for MFv2 1.0 specification (PRI is public review; this means that the spec is technically complete but not yet stabilized)
• Beta code of MFv2 1.0 ICU code available
• Identify at least 1 other interoperable implementation

15 August

• Release candidate for MFv2 1.0 specification

15 September

• Release of MFv2 1.0 specification
• ICU release candidate

?? October

• ICU release of MFv2 1.0

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Key questions:

1. What form should our specification take? Currently it is the markdown under /spec in this repo. Mark suggested that it be a "chapter" or section in LMDL. I tend to think we should write a separate UTS, since our syntax isn't really about locale data. Editing a proper technical report (whether is it part of UAX35 or not) makes it easier to discuss normative language.

2. Is it reasonable for us to accomplish this in six months (Feb - Jun)? We don't have to meet the fall date--there is no specific requirement that we do so--and many of our discussions are still pretty open-ended. If we can't hit the 2023 calendar dates, what schedule would we accept? If it is very far into the future, we risk becoming irrelevant.

3. What other external milestones (if any) are important (e.g. EMCA-402, TC39, etc.)? What other internal milestones are important?