Three month spec freeze

[solderpunk]

Ahoy,

As of yesterday, the freeze is over!  The spec is now "liquid" once again.

Many people involved in Gemini now were not here for the original freeze
announcement, so I want to give this some context.

The spec is now open to non-trivial changes again, but this is not a time
to start suggesting new features "willy nilly".  The idea behind the
freeze was to give everybody the chance to build things, or try to build
things, using the spec as it stood, so that at the end of the freeze we
could make changes which solved actual concrete problems people had run
into using Gemini in the real world.  The idea is that we then fix those
problems as best we can, and do another freeze.  I want each freeze to
last longer than the previous, and for the changes we make to get smaller
and smaller each time.  We should not expect any major changes and
certainly no new totally new capabilities to enter the spec at this point.
We are in the "polishing" phase.

A lot happened during these last three months!  Notably, Astrobotany
appeared as the first non-trivial use of client certificates, revealing
how poorly specced that whole thing was (and is).  Non-English content
appeared in Geminispace for the first time (and may much more follow!),
prompting questions related to search and accessibility in a
multilingual space.  People started using pre-formatted lines in ways
not conducive to search or accessibility, raising more questions on
these topics.  Plus a whole pile of tiny ambiguities or inconsistencies
were spotted, many of which I pre-emptively cleaned up so that we could
now focus on these bigger issues.  No dout many more remain!

I really think there is more than enough on our plate to deal with
before announcing another freeze, so I'm not really looking for more
suggestions on things to change.  But if anybody thinks they see a real
problem with the design of anything currently in the protocol, in
principle now is the time to mention it.

I will start making changes to the spec to fix the problems described
above in the near future.  I'm not sure when I will formally announce
the next freeze, but I expect it to be in weeks, not days or months.  As
always I'll share my thoughts with the list and solicit feedback about
proposed changes before making them official.

Cheers,
Solderpunk