Governance

How Omni-IR is run, and how its specification changes.

Today: one maintainer

Omni-IR was started by Joel Dsouza (@jdsouza1), who is currently its only maintainer. The maintainer:

• decides what changes in the specification, the conformance suite and the reference implementations;
• reviews and merges pull requests;
• publishes releases (npm, Swift Package Manager);
• enforces the code of conduct.

Decisions are made in public, in issues and pull requests, with the reasoning written down. Larger decisions are recorded in the PLAN-*.md files.

How the specification changes

1. Proposal. Anyone opens an issue with the "Spec proposal" template: the problem, the proposed lines of Omni-IR, and what it would mean for existing streams and renderers.
2. Discussion. The proposal stays open for comments for at least a week, unless it is a fix to an obvious mistake.
3. Decision. The maintainer accepts, asks for changes, or declines, and says why in the issue.
4. Change. An accepted proposal lands as one pull request that updates SPEC.md, the conformance cases, and all three reference parsers, so the spec is never ahead of a working implementation.
5. Release. The change ships in the next version and is listed in CHANGELOG.md.

The principles a proposal is judged against:

• The model sends intent, never presentation. No HTML, CSS, styling props or code.
• Every action that changes data is governed and checked against the app's tool registry.
• Every rule can be tested by a language-neutral conformance case.
• Streams stay flat and line-oriented, so each line can be checked and drawn as it arrives.

Versions

Until version 1.0 the specification is a draft, and any release may contain incompatible changes; each is listed in the changelog with what to do. From 1.0, incompatible changes need a new major version.

Growing beyond one maintainer

Once people contribute regularly, a contributor with a record of good reviews and changes can be invited to become a maintainer. With three or more maintainers, specification decisions move from one person to agreement among the maintainers, with a vote when they can't agree. This document will be updated when that happens.

Licence and trademarks

The specification and the code are licensed under Apache-2.0. Anyone may implement the specification. An implementation may say it is "Omni-IR conformant" when it passes the full conformance suite for the version it names.