Sketching the Spectral Fork Roadmap with Phil Sturgeon

The first cut at the roadmap. Removing the telemetry Stoplight added is an obvious early job, but the bigger question is how to keep the work focused on the ruleset specification when the tooling always pulls the conversation toward itself.

At Bloomberg I started with the low-hanging fruit: every API should have a name and a description. The base ruleset should be that minimal, with everything else layered on top. Phil’s view is that the current core rules carry a lot of Stoplight-specific baggage.

Complaints about JSONPath are one of the most common reasons people give for not using Spectral. Promoting aliases out of the OpenAPI ruleset into the core would let people reference things by name, and could leave room for other ways of pointing at a document.

I lint APIs.json, JSON Schema and GitHub Actions YAML with Spectral today. Formats need to be a first-class part of the spec. Industry work such as FHIR and OWASP rulesets, and whether those are their own dimension, went into the doc as open questions.

Someone asked me to stop calling the forked CLI a CLI, since it isn’t always used that way. We also agreed the group shouldn’t fork libraries unless it has to. Stabilize first.

I want an Open Collective so I can pay Phil and others. API Commons can hold the work until the community decides between the Linux Foundation, the OpenAPI Initiative, or standing on its own. Next step: bring in vendors and keep the Friday sessions rolling.