aep versioning and stability proposal

[toumorokoshi]

Hi everyone! 🎉 I wanted to announce that we have, after several rounds of discussion, that we have a proposal we have aligned upon for AEP versioning and stability! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_8CitAyKGreE5fQN57cyb6y-1Lq0OLF619Y9ccJj8iY/edit?tab=t.0

We will work on publishing the official AEP this upcoming week. The general guidance is:

---

AEPs will be published in editions, similar (but not identical) to specifications such as for the C++ or Rust programming language:

Changes to the specification will only be made when the next version is published.
The naming of the version will be based on the year in which it is published (e.g. aep-2025).
Upon publishing the current edition, the next preview edition will be created (e.g. aep-2027-preview). This preview edition will accumulate changes until it is published as the next edition.
AEP editions may have patch version updates which adhere to semantic versioning (e.g. aep-2025.25). The patch version will only contain fixes to typos and clarification on existing guidance.
Editions will be published every 2 years.
first-party clients will support the 3 latest versions of the AEPs (so an AEP edition will see support for at least 6 years in the clients we produce).

Although not strictly related to versioning, the AEP project will generally strive to minimize breaking changes, even across editions.

---

I know that a lot of feedback was around the lack of stability with the specification. We hope that, with the merger of this edition-based proposal and the upcoming aep-2025 spec, that this provides the stability that everyone has been looking for, while providing a preview edition for those who want to contribute to providing updates on the best practices we outline).