A followup question on my part:
From: loic@dachary.org
Hi [redacted],
I’m in the process of answering the questions and I’m not sure I understand the following sentence:
Projects that are currently autonomous could be hesitant to switch away from their existing internal abstractions, serialisations and on disk file formats
What do you mean exactly by “projects that are currently autonomous”? An example would be enough to clarify.
Thanks!
Got a reply within the hour.
Hi Loïc,
Projects that are currently autonomous could be hesitant to switch away from their existing internal abstractions, serialisations and on disk file formats
What do you mean exactly by “projects that are currently autonomous”? An example would be enough to clarify.
an external spec gives guidance, but it also is a corset that enforces certain aspects.
If the developers of some forge software want to change how it works (because they for instance are doing refactoring, and are running into performance issues with something that is part of the spec but which they don’t particularly care about for their use cases), they can do so without having to ask anyone for permission - and without external effects. They only have to deal with their own legacy migration, which is often quite simple if there is versioning of the data.
Once you start using some external specification, and external parties using other applications start interfacing with you - you more or less are forced to maintain compliance with that specification from now on. One lock oneself to the fate of the spec, and has to ‘obey’ whatever happens. This means you are no longer autonomous in that sense.
Does that clarify?
Best,
To which I replied:
It does, perfectly. Thanks!