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0 pointskeithwhor6y ago0 comments

I don’t disagree with your assessment on semver as it currently exists for, say, NPM packages.

I do think that with web APIs specifically, the surface area is a lot smaller — the HTTP interface is literally all you touch — so semver, in its purest form, is actually completely enforceable as long as you understand the API schema.

Our team has talked a lot about either hard-enforcing or automatically applying semver where applicable. My question to you is — does this sound reasonable, and if you knew a semver contract was actually bound to implementation (i.e. guaranteed and not implied), would you trust it more?

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6 comments · 3 top-level

Waterluvian6y ago· 2 in thread

I don't really trust semver insofar as there's nothing to trust, in my opinion. What am I trusting? That I don't have to understand what changed and can take semver's word for it? To me, personally, that's an abdication of my responsibility to know what I'm utilizing and implementing against.

What's the practical value you're hoping to gain by hard-enforcing semver, especially if the surface area of HTTP APIs is a lot smaller? And this isn't a loaded question. I might just not be privy to your team's needs.

Also consider (and this again falls within the realm of personal opinion) the value of achieving _maximum possible statelessness_ as a developer. If I'm reading you right, you're asking me to know and remember, and probably write down somewhere, that your API's versioning means something different than others. So I now have another branching path to maintain: how to behave when your API changes. What I like about the simple numbered API schema is that I can come back to the API usage in a stateless manner. I just see that the number is different and I know what to do: learn what changed and decide if I have to act on it. Of course I could do this by looking at a semver as a unique identifier without semantic meaning, but that kind of leads to my initial point: encourage best practice by not giving the developer a semantic shortcut to which they can abdicate responsibility.

keithwhorOP6y ago

I think you misunderstand where I’m coming from with my line of questioning.

I’m asking questions because we provide tools that standardize the API development experience. Semver is trustable if the tools create the contract instead of the developer that decides to build the API. We deliver the tools that create the contract.

In this sense, APIs built and delivered atop our platform don’t need to “encourage best practice,” best practice is — or at least can be — hardcoded in with no potential for footguns.

Your concerns about semver are well-founded. I’m asking questions because I’m pondering aloud if we can fix them and change semver — with respect to APIs — from a social contract to a coded contract, and include tools necessary to inform end-users of API changes. :)

Does that make more sense?

Waterluvian6y ago

Yeah it does. Thanks for clarifying. I think there's a very complex conversation to be had here, especially since you're working on a meta-level of tooling to ease API development.

With two days before my first vacation of the year, my brain is a pile of mush. I'm going to politely and apologetically bow out of this conversation. =)

setr6y ago· 1 in thread

Tbh, it doesn't matter. But the semantics should be such that it doesn't matter -- the user of the API shouldn't care whether it's implementation bounded or not. But Everytime you break that abstraction, trust in the abstraction is necessarily reduced.

Bounding to implementation is just the easiest way out -- if your policies, tests and protocols consistently fail to uphold that abstraction, then the you can fallback to this very simple (presumably innefficient) strategy to do so.

But I, as a dev, just want a stable API, and I don't care how it's done.

zerkten6y ago

How would your trust be impacted if there was better communication ahead of a breaking change you could almost agree with? i.e. the experience has been well beyond that which you currently expect and have been provided good reasons proactively.

The gap I see a lot starts with a bad versioning strategy and continues through bad API analytics to bad communications for developers.

The API provider should be able to understand all of the individual clients to the point where they can decide to progressively migrate them one-by-one, if necessary. There shouldn't be a need to use metadata like IP addresses or user-agents to try and identify the clients. Unless someone has walked through these scenarios ahead of time, it's difficult manage when issues arise.

wongarsu6y ago

I don't think semver is easily enforceable. Take for example the discussion in this thread about stripe changing the order in which hooks fired, which completely changed the meaning of a null value in the next_payment_attempt field. Just looking at a traditional API schema wouldn't reveal any change, yet this was a major breaking change to some. Maybe you can create an API schema which encompasses the order in which hooks fire, but that still doesn't help if somebody changes the semantics of a field without changing its name or type.

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