Monday, February 10, 2003 - Mon, 10 Feb 2003

Two of the Genealogy maillist/newsgroups I subscribe to are GEDCOM-L and LINES-L. The former discusses GEDCOM and includes mostly developers and innovators mostly complaining about the current version of GEDCOM 5.5.1 and disagreeing as to which way it should go. LINES-L discusses the Lifelines Unix program, written many years ago by Tom Wetmore, but now passed over to Open Source. Tom still frequents both lists and I very much like to hear what he has to say and respect his opinions. He, after all, did a tremendous job with the first development of Lifelines. He was complaining in GEDCOM-L the other day about the lack of an “Event” entity in GEDCOM that is a necessity. I agreed and pointed out that the GEDCOM XML Version 6 proposed by LDS seems to fix this problem. But then I got to vent myself that they didn’t go far enough and also set up “Places” as a separate entity, and Tom agreed. There. Now I feel better, too.