A proposal to freeze the Gemini specification

[Solderpunk]

On 25.10.2021 23:27, almaember wrote:

> 1. Gemini has been in use by a large number of people for years now,
> without a major change to the specification.
> 
> 2. The mailing list represents a minority of the users and
> implementers of Gemini.
> 
> 3. For the vast majority of users and implementers, the specification
> hosted on gemini.circumlunar.space (from now: Spec0) remains the
> authoritative description of the protocol.

I completely agree on all three points.

> It has been proven in practice that Gemini functions well, and that no
> additional features were strictly necessary.

I don't currently plan to add any new features.

> I believe, that in order to avoid more controversy, incompatibility
> between implementations, and power struggles, we should freeze the
> specification permanently.

Consider it "feature frozen".  There's still some stuff which I think 
ought to be done.  But I do not anticipate making any changes which 
could not be fairly classed as "tidying up technical loose ends".  I 
can't promise nobody will have to change a single line of code in their 
clients/servers, but I'm not going to do anything which is going to 
cause widespread substantial breakage.  Ordinary end users probably 
won't notice anything changing.

> Side note regarding Sp.'s return: With all due respect, I do not
> believe that you can realistically call yourself the dictator of the
> project. At most you can claim to rule this mailing list, which per
> axiom №2 is only a minority of the actual community. While I respect
> your role in the creation of the protocol (i.e., the whole of the
> original design), Gemini has grown larger than what a single BDFL can
> control. Especially after disappearing for months, I do not think we
> should consider your opinion worth any more than that of any other
> user of this mailing list.

I realise you've retracted this review in another post.  I'm going to 
briefly address it otherwise because I suspect there may be other people 
who still feel this way.

Look, to some extent, I get where you are coming from.  The folk notion 
of BDFL can only be pushed so far.  If I had disappeared for ten years 
and the project had flourished under alternate leadership and then I 
sprang back from the void and claimed that since I never formally 
relinquished BDFL-status I still had the divine right to undo the 
previous decade of change willy-nilly, nobody would think that was fine. 
  And I get that I haven't been a very responsible leader this year.  I'm 
sorry.  People are entitled to be somewhat disgruntled.  Anybody who 
knows me knows I'm much more of an idealist than a pragmatist, but at 
this point, to people questioning the legitimacy of my return to 
leadership, I really have to ask whether you honestly think, as a purely 
practical matter, that there's an alternative which is going to lead to 
a better result?  10 years of bikeshedding and slippery slope expansion 
under "design by committee" seems like the *best* we could hope for.  At 
worst, we could end up with warring factions and multiple threads of 
incompatible parallel development of dubious legitimacy.  I actually 
think the tremendous diversity of implementations we already have would 
act as an effective countermeasure to drastic change happening under 
that second scenario - and that is exactly by design - but I don't care 
to put that theory to the test.  Me coming back, kicking ass and chewing 
bubblegum seems likely to be both the *least* contested approach amongst 
the broader community and also the *least* likely to result in big 
changes.  It may not be perfect, but it's probably going to work pretty 
well - hopefully like Gemini itself. :)

Cheers,
Solderpunk

PS: Don't worry, I've got plenty of gum.