RAML 1.0 RC2 Plan

Back in November 2015, we released the very first release candidate (RC1) for RAML 1.0. We would never have thought how much feedback we get at that time in different forms such as excellent reviews for the newly added features or also as a fair amount of constructive feedback. For us, that was already a huge success and has shown us that we are on the right track. It took us a while to go through each of your feedback, to evaluate the impact, talk to individual people from the community to show them improvements and also to get their insights on how they use RAML; all to make the right decisions that make your experience using RAML better than before.

I am very pleased to tell you that we are almost there. We have a plan in place to ensure getting RC2 in your hands as soon as possible before we go into a final round of feedback to close out for 1.0 GA. Most issues that we discuss for RC2 are either labeled as raml10-rc1 or raml10-rc2, and there might be a couple more coming this week. However, the plan is to finish off all candidates this week and start to incorporate the changes to the specification.

Let's quickly talk about one specific feedback we got from you that perfectly leads back into our plans. The top constructive feedback that came back from many people was that there are only little information that helps tracking changes or any visibility into our processes improving or modifying the specification. We had our reasons for doing it differently but recognize the need to change our mind in favor for the better. As of today, we enable everyone to see what we see by fully leverage our Github repository again. We chose a multi-branch approach to make sure that we do not collate with the current 0.8 GA version, the 1.0 RC1, and any progress on 1.0 RC2. Therefore, find the following structure:

• master - always the current GA version of RAML
• raml-10 - the current version for RAML 1.0 (currently RC1)
• raml-10-rc2 - development branch that contains all modifications for RC2
• {others} - these are feature branches used to implement each issue labeled with raml10-rc2 separately

Going forward, we also very appreciate any help from you, our community, to improve the content of the specification. You can fix spelling or grammar mistakes, examples, or anything else that is related to content by sending a simple pull request (see the contribution section in our new README file for more information).

All that leads us to the following steps for RC2:

1. discuss, create, and finalize all candidate the w/c 29th February
2. incorporating all changes labeled with raml10-rc2
3. proofreading and finalizing the content
4. merge raml-10-rc2 into raml-10

We hope that making our processes more visible and adding more level of contribution will have a significant impact in the future.