Pairing half point byes

I had a chat with the chairman of the FIDE Swiss Pairings Committee Christian Krause about how to treat half point byes for pairing purposes. For the moment the FIDE pairing rules are silent on this matter, and a number of pairing programs take a different approach. Sensibly he said that a half point bye should be treated the same as a full point bye ie no opponent, no colour, downfloat. Hopefully this will become part of the published pairing rules in the future, allowing authors of pairing programs to all take the same approach with this issue.