On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 6:28 AM, Yuri Astrakhan <yuriastrakhan(a)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
[1]
http://www.mnot.net/blog/2012/12/04/api-evolution