Hey Ryan,
Let's get the process issue straight. We voted A, not A + B. Perhaps you
hoped that A implies B, but that is your personal opinion on the topic.
(as a reminder, you were the one who insisted on a first vote on a very
minimal proposition, before discussing the specifics)
Having the community accept B implies another discussion and a vote. And
that's the discussion we're having currently, actually, so I don't even
know why you seem to be objecting.
Regards
Antoine.
Le 04/09/2026 à 22:02, Ryan Blue a écrit :
From the doc, here's the point that we've been discussing:
Readers need a simple mechanism to know whether they support all features
they may encounter when reading a specific file.
This is a follow-up to decide between options:
- Set footer version to 3 (for example)
- Set footer version to 3+ when preview features are present
- Set footer version to 3/3+ and record preview feature names
- Use magic bytes for version - PAR3
From this, it appears to me that most of us (at least those of us
discussing it) have been working under the assumption that our vote meant
using the version by writing it into files. Personally, I think this is
also a natural conclusion. A reader needs to know what version a file was
written with in order to decide whether it has guarantees (which is another
way to say what's in the versioning doc).
I don't think that this is a dishonest or bad faith argument.
My suggestion to ask the community is really to clarify what we all think
we voted on. If there was genuine confusion about this then let's talk
through it. But, again, I don't think that this was unclear to most people.
Do you agree that it's reasonable to ask what people thought they were
agreeing to?
Ryan
On Fri, Sep 4, 2026 at 12:26 PM Antoine Pitrou <[email protected]> wrote:
Le 04/09/2026 à 20:35, Ryan Blue a écrit :
It sounds like you're suggesting that we don't version data files. I
don't
think that makes sense with versioning and I'm pretty sure most people
that
voted to use versions would agree with me.
The *only* implication of the vote was to move forward with the usage of
community-agreed versions (rather than, say, mechanistic calendar-based
presets) to signal levels of compatibility between readers and writers.
If you wanted the vote to mean something more, then you should have had
the vote explicitly mention it. Anything else is dishonest.
Should I start a thread dedicated to asking the
community whether most people thought that "using versions" would mean
writing the version used for a file in the file metadata?
No, you should wait for this discussion to happen in the hope of
reaching a consensus.
Personally, I don't think readers should up front refuse reading a file
that has a version number higher than their official compatibility
level. Other people (Micah, Will, at least) see to be of the same opinion.
Regards
Antoine.
