No new features vs. staging process

I've gone over the CG charter, staging process, and AP-only WG charter 
and generated a lot of issues:

https://github.com/swicg/potential-charters/issues/created_by/evanp

Most of them are just textual; I think most of the others are relatively 
easy to resolve. I added PRs where I could.

The one issue is most concerning to me is how we keep the ActivityPub 
spec stable and backwards compatible so we don't sever or interfere with 
the robust and bustling Fediverse.

We have too many (~100) implementations of ActivityPub to make an 
incompatible upgrade smooth. It will take months or years for any 
particular feature to be implemented in all those software packages; in 
the meantime, new and old software will have to interact on the same 
network.

Backwards-compatible here means:

- Adding an optional feature

- Upgrading an existing feature by adding a new method and deprecating 
the existing method (but keeping it as a documented fallback)

I think the WG's current scope (no new features) probably solves this 
for a 1.1 version, but I think later versions will need to add new 
features in a backwards-compatible way.

I really like the structure of the staging proposal, but we'll need a WG 
with the mandate to add new features and even create new documents to 
make it work.

Evan

Received on Thursday, 7 November 2024 03:15:24 UTC