People can't find the historical drafts v3 and v4

[agebhar1]

Maybe it's a good idea to keep historical drafts v3 and v4 from Kris Zyp et. al. within this repository to be near-complete. The current archive does only contains the (meta) schema.

[handrews]

This is being tracked over at the web site repo which is where things are actually hosted (I'm not sure why we have those archive folders here, actually) json-schema-org/json-schema-org.github.io#59 is what you want.

[agebhar1]

Thanks for the hint. It seems the schema within the archive folders here is not the same as in json-schema-org/json-schema-org.github.io ... 😕

I wonder why the (historical) draft v3, v4 is contained in the website repository and not in spec (this) repository. Shouldn't the website repository only contains the representation and not the data from the drafts itself?

[handrews]

You'll have to ask @Relequestual, who I think is away until January, as I don't quite understand the rationale for the exact split (it predates my involvement with the project).

[agebhar1]

Thx.

[Relequestual]

Sorry for the long delay. I'm not really sure why it happened that way. @awwright did the majority of the migration work.

I agree that the draft 3 and 4 versions should be in this repo... maybe we can add that to the backburner as an easy win. I'm going to re-open this issue, as I feel the XML used to build the documents should be in the archive in this repo, not just the meta-schemas.

[awwright]

@agebhar1 Old drafts become obsoleted with a successor release and shouldn't be implemented. Otherwise for historical interest, the IETF Datatracker stores old drafts at their website.

Is there any particular use you have to host the old drafts on the website?

[agebhar1]

@awwright some (at least 3) projects which support draft 4 pointing to 'latest' version (e.g. fixed it), which might be a bad idea.

The archive directory exists within this repository with the meta-schemas. This might be a bit confusing that the specs itself are not present - at least for me. @handrews referred to json-schema-org.github.io#59 which is not the right place IMHO. The website (repository) should not host any kind of specs - I would suggest to use git-submodules for that use case with a dedicated version tag. But accidentally the (XML) source for draft 4 is not in the repository which equals to IETF's hosted version (see comment).

🤔

[handrews]

I would suggest to use git-submodules for that use case with a dedicated version tag.

That would require having the old versions in the repo and tagged. For whatever reason (I was not around) when the new repos were created the old change history was abandoned.

[Relequestual]

Old drafts become obsoleted with a successor release and shouldn't be implemented. Otherwise for historical interest, the IETF Datatracker stores old drafts at their website.
@awwright

That maybe how you feel, but that doesn't work out in reality, where people are actually wanting to use JSON Schema.
When draft-6 is release, everyone should immediatly no longer write draft-4/5 schemas, and use draft-6? With what library support? It's taken FOREVER to see draft-4 support in Perl, and even now it's not as good as it should be. Sometimes people have to use what they need to use.

For whatever reason (I was not around) when the new repos were created the old change history was abandoned.
@handrews

I really don't know how this happened. I wish it wans't the case =[

@agebhar1 I'm all for getting this fixed. I DO see it as an issue.

[awwright]

That maybe how you feel

Well it's not merely a feeling, that's standard IETF process, it's literally written into every single page of the documents. To post for this thread:

Expires: August 4, 2013

Further:

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

This is not normally an issue for standards documents, but I suspect this keeps popping up for JSON Schema because of how the process was treated in the past.

The IETF does actually remove expired Internet-Drafts from their FTP server and public index, leaving copies available only on the Datatracker for historical interest.

When draft-6 is release, everyone should immediatly no longer write draft-4/5 schemas, and use draft-6?

I don't expect people to write documents making use of features that nobody implements, by design it's supposed to be mostly reverse-compatible.

And it's perfectly fine for implementations to add support for old features -- but they're doing it to make sure they support old JSON Schema documents, not because it's written into an expired I-D.

---

The website (repository) should not host any kind of specs

The only authoritative version of the specs are the plain text files as published by the IETF. These documents are traditionally distributed by hand, so there's no canon website for them, but copies are distributed through the IETF website, the IETF Datatracker, and the RFC Editor (for RFCs) -- and json-schema.org.

The json-schema.org website is a perfectly reasonable place for the specifications, it's nothing more than a mirror just like the IETF provides. An HTML formatted version is provided, however this version is non-normative.

The spec repository is a source repository, which has one job, and that is for tracking change control for the next release of the document. Storing old drafts would be akin to storing every public/tagged build of a software program in version control.

The meta-schemas are slightly different, in that unlike the I-Ds, they do not expire, and remain fair game for any current JSON Schema implementation or document to reference. So they all get stored in the repository.

This issue doesn't impact the specification in any way, so I'll close it out in favor of the mailing list or website tracker.