I don't think it matters so much where the compliance suites live or what process we use to edit them. An XEP seems fine, but so does a page on the website and we just say "and the council has to approve changes". The only difference that I see is who hits the publish button: the website people or the editors. We can debate about having process already being a benefit of doing an XEP, but when it comes down to it if we did it one way or the other it wouldn't really matter except that we'd spend a bit of time bikeshedding the formatting of the web or wiki page and who can approve changes. In the end we'd still have a document in either location that people can reference.
However, I do think it's important to have some form of version number. Years are convenient and give people some idea that they're looking at the latest one, but a page that says "version 1.0, go here for latest" is fine too. It's also important that we review the document regularly (even if we don't change the version number). If we don't have a version number at all having badges or some way to advertise support becomes meaningless because one client advertising support with the compliance suites may not have been updated in 5 years and completely incompatible with a more modern client also advertising support with newer compliance suites (whereas two clients that advertise "Supports XSF compliance 1.0" or something are likely compatible, and two clients that advertise "Supports XSF compliance 2020" make it obvious that they're both also supporting recent recommendations). Requiring regular review (whether the version number changes or not) also seems important and helps us not fall into a situation where users think "these suites are 5 years old, but are still 'Final', are they current or did the XSF just forget about them like they do with a lot of old specs no one uses?". If the version is based on the year, bumping the version yearly (even if there were minimal or no changes) just gives a nice signal that they have been looked at and means you can tell on a badge that a client is using the latest or near-latest version, if it's not based on a year it may not be as useful to bump the version if there are no changes, but it still seems useful to require a yearly (or whatever time period people pick) review and automatically deprecate if the council forgets about it. The compliance suites inherently go out of date, whether that's in one year or three we want to make sure we don't leave them as recommendations when the XEPs they reference have moved on. —Sam _______________________________________________ Standards mailing list Info: https://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/standards Unsubscribe: standards-unsubscr...@xmpp.org _______________________________________________
