Should we put out a 3.0.5 (or formal Errata for 3.0.4)?

[handrews]

For good reasons, we declared that we would not do a 3.0.5 release.

However, we have discovered some outright errors in the 3.0.4 text, most notably the guidance around percent-encoding and in: header, and to a more ambiguous degree around multipart. It would not be hard to backport these (and whatever other few trivial-to-backport 3.1.2 fixes, as there are really not that many) and do a 3.0.5. Or we could do something novel and issue errata.

3.0.5 option

We could do a quick 3.0.5, either by manually constructing the document out of the published 3.0.4 spec using something akin to our old process of patching different files across branches (I still have a somewhat quirky script I can use for this), or by making a v3.0-dev branch.

Pros:

• It's what people will expect
• It would be the same publication process we know

Cons:

• It's annoying work
• We said we wouldn't do it

Errata option

We could edit 3.0.4 in-place to add "Errata" links (ideally at the top of each section with errors) to something hosted on the spec site. Note that this is what IETF does, and we usually cite IETF as the precedent for not updating in place, so this sort of update-in-place should be fine. (idk if W3C does this or not)

Pros:

• We don't need to resurrect a branch

Cons:

• No one will expect it or know to look for it
• No one reads the top-level intro part, so we'd need to put more Errata links than an IETF RFC does
• We'll still need to do annoying infrastructure work

Tagging @OAI/tsc

[lornajane]

You forgot the "do nothing" option

[ralfhandl]

"Do nothing" is tempting, but we do have a broken link for "Security Scheme Object" in 3.0.4 - links go to the fixed field in the Components Object instead of the section on "Security Scheme Object".

Fixing this would not change visible text and only repair the anchor(s), so we could argue to do that in-place.

[karenetheridge]

My doesn't-really-count-for-anything vote would be for doing a 3.0.5, and using this as an opportunity to streamline the release process (and who knows, there could be a need for a 3.0.6 at some point).