On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 6:28 AM, Yuri Astrakhan yuriastrakhan@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure how semver applies here really - every number change (1->2) is a breaking change, and v2 could be marked as experimental in the docs until it is ready.
Ok, so you are seeing every increment as a major version change then. I think semver helps to be explicit about what the version number actually means. I guess in part I'm trying to understand why fixing bugs involves a major version change, and breaking backwards compatibility.
Not sure about restful yet - it might not provide much benefit to the users. I guess we should have either a different thread or bug reports discussing proposed structure change.
Mark Nottingham recently wrote about semver, REST and how to evolve Web APIs [1]. I think developers are increasingly familiar with interacting with REST style APIs (Amazon S3, Twitter, Facebook, etc). In general REST APIs encourage simpler documentation, easier cacheability, and can often make the need for 3rd party API libraries disappear, if a good HTTP library is available.
A change to the major version of the Mediawiki API might be a good time to think make a fresh start and think about the API in this way...or not :-)
//Ed