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solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG
Tue Jun 2 20:26:58 BST 2020
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Ahoy,
As of yesterday, the freeze is over! The spec is now "liquid" once again.
Many people involved in Gemini now were not here for the original freezeannouncement, so I want to give this some context.
The spec is now open to non-trivial changes again, but this is not a timeto start suggesting new features "willy nilly". The idea behind thefreeze was to give everybody the chance to build things, or try to buildthings, using the spec as it stood, so that at the end of the freeze wecould make changes which solved actual concrete problems people had runinto using Gemini in the real world. The idea is that we then fix thoseproblems as best we can, and do another freeze. I want each freeze tolast longer than the previous, and for the changes we make to get smallerand smaller each time. We should not expect any major changes andcertainly no new totally new capabilities to enter the spec at this point.We are in the "polishing" phase.
A lot happened during these last three months! Notably, Astrobotanyappeared as the first non-trivial use of client certificates, revealinghow poorly specced that whole thing was (and is). Non-English contentappeared in Geminispace for the first time (and may much more follow!),prompting questions related to search and accessibility in amultilingual space. People started using pre-formatted lines in waysnot conducive to search or accessibility, raising more questions onthese topics. Plus a whole pile of tiny ambiguities or inconsistencieswere spotted, many of which I pre-emptively cleaned up so that we couldnow focus on these bigger issues. No dout many more remain!
I really think there is more than enough on our plate to deal withbefore announcing another freeze, so I'm not really looking for moresuggestions on things to change. But if anybody thinks they see a realproblem with the design of anything currently in the protocol, inprinciple now is the time to mention it.
I will start making changes to the spec to fix the problems describedabove in the near future. I'm not sure when I will formally announcethe next freeze, but I expect it to be in weeks, not days or months. Asalways I'll share my thoughts with the list and solicit feedback aboutproposed changes before making them official.
Cheers,Solderpunk