Policy: make changes to a policy explicit in the policy.

[Retzoh]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I think the current versioning system for policies could be improved to enable easier policy update management. Today you need to create a new policy referencing an incorrect one through the prev_policy field to update or cancel it. This means that from the provider perspective, looking at one given policy is not enough to know if they should comply with it or not. You need to look at all of them.

Describe the solution you'd like

A solution could be to let agencies update only the ending date of a policy. This way if a policy needs to be updated, the city can just terminate the obsolete version of it and create a new up to date version.

Is this a breaking change

A breaking change would require consumers or implementors of the API to modify their code for it to continue to function (ex: renaming of a required field or the change in data type of an existing field). A non-breaking change would allow existing code to continue to function (ex: addition of an optional field or the creation of a new optional endpoint).

We could also add a new field, next_policies, tracking the replacing policies and making it easier to follow the history of changes.

The prev_policy field could be left for retro-compatibility and / or readability of the history of a policy.

• No, not breaking

I don't think it would be breaking since the prev_policy field could still be filled in in the replacing policy.

Impacted Spec

For which spec is this feature being requested?

• policy

Describe alternatives you've considered

We could just leave it as it is.

[marie-x]

@Retzoh do you still have an opinion on this?

[schnuerle]

This could be a good thing to look at for 2.0. How does the immutable nature of Policy work for everyone, and is there any better solution?

[S-eb]

agree Michael I would like to discuss this point

[jean-populus]

Is this still a pressing issue we want to address or is it ok to close it for now?

[marie-x]

Eh, I think doing a diff between two JSON blobs is pretty straightforward ... I'm inclined to close.