Permanent freeze on non-trivial new features

Greetings all,

After today's change to the spec to introduce some new line types, I am 
announcing a permanent freeze on the addition of non-trivial new 
features to Gemini.

This is a bit of a deviation from the big picture plan I sketched when
announcing the last three month spec free, which was:

> 1. INTERVAL = 3 months
> 2. Spend INTERVAL actually building Geminispace and associated tools,
>    with no major spec changes.
> 3. Ask "What is the *single* biggest problem/shortcoming of the current
>    spec, based on everything that has actually been done or been tried
>    in the past INTERVAL?"
> 4. Possibly (but not necessarily) change the spec to address the
>    answer to 3, if the problem is deemed bad enough and can be
>    addressed without adding too much extra complexity.
> 5. Set INTERVAL = 2*INTERVAL
> 6. GOTO 2, or END.

I still very much agree with the spirit of this plan and think this is a
fine way to develop small and simple software with a clear purpose and
to avoid the ever-present danger of feature creep.  That said, in terms 
of the practical implications for Gemini, strictly following this plan 
would cause things to stretch on too long.  Announcing a six month 
freeze would bring us into next year, and to be honest I really want 
this whole thing (as in, the specification of Gemini) to be absolutely 
done and dusted by the end of this year.  That includes all the final
fine-toothed combing and worrying about little details and edge cases.
Which means actual work needs to stop as soon as possible.

What we have specced right now is still small and simple, easy to learn
and easy to implement.  IMHO we have done a good job smoothing off all
the rough edges of Gopher and all of the project's original ambitions
have been met.  The full capabilities of, and the full extent of
problems with, even very simple systems like Gemini take years to be
fully uncovered and understood (a point the demosceners amongst us
will attest to!).  Things like Tomasino's recent post about the exciting
possibilities of taking advantage of the fact that Gemtext can be 
correctly processed line-by-line to "stream" content like chatrooms or 
logs, and Francesco's post about CSRF in Gemini, both show that we have
only just begun to scratch the surface of Gemini.  Adding anything
further at this stage when there are still so very many practical points
needing attention, and when we still don't even really know what we
have, seems very unwise to me.

This means there will never be any official mechanism for uploading
Gemini content within Gemini itself, beyond what can be built on top of
what we already have, with possibly a few trivial tweaks added to ease
this.  I realise this will disappoint a lot of people and I'm honestly
really unhappy about that.  But Gemini was never supposed to be all
things to all people - I really don't believe any software which is
really simple *can* be that, and I really believe that radical
simplicity is necessary to make software possible to correctly reason
about, which in turn is necessary to make it reliable and secure and for
users to exercise their autonomy, and to make it easy to implement and
deploy, which in turn is necessary to keep it from falling into familiar
traps of centralisation, monopolisation, etc.

If there are people in the community who want to independently develop a
separate companion protocol in the spirit of Gemini to address the
upload problem, I can't and won't attempt to discourage them, as I'm
fully aware that I have absolutely no right to do so.

As the focus of activity in the community begins to move away from
defining the Gemini protocol and toward building things on top of the
fixed foundation that its final form offers, there is honestly a really
wide range of things that interested people can get their hands dirty
with if they want to, and this includes lots of stuff related to making
Gemini more accessible to people without the requisite technology
background to make use of pubnix hosting and similar resources.  This
includes development work (I think it's very clear that we have not even
begun to scratch the surface of possible ways to ease the publishing
process without adding anything to the protocol) and educational work
(writing good Gemini-hosted content helping people acquire that
technical backround).  This is very worthy work toward a very worthy
goal and I fully support it.

Those of you who just won't know what to do with yourselves without the
thrill of arguing over specification details need not feel any sense of
loss as the Gemini protocol begins to stabilise, even if you don't have
the stomach for the less glamorous work of fiddly minor final detail
wrangling: we still have a big pile of interesting "side-specs" that
have not received full attention, most notably adapting robots.txt into
an environment without User-Agents.

I think we can rightfully be very proud of ourselves for what we've
developed here so far, and I really look forward to us starting to make
use of it in earnest!  Thanks to everybody who has contributed to the
project in any way, large or small.  Despite the air of finality
throughout this email, this really is just the very beginning of this
whole thing.  Let's build an awesome Geminispace!

Cheers,
Solderpunk