Feed Life Cycle Policy

  1. Users should subscribe to the API mailing list to be informed of feed changes and updates to the policy.
  2. We will offer 3 levels of feeds:
    Preview feed
    This is a development/work in progress feed, it may be modified before it becomes a production feed. Different versions in preview will not be preserved/deprecated, but changes will be documented. A preview feed may or may not ever become the production feed.
    Production feed
    Any feed in production will be available for at least 6 months in either production or as a deprecated feed.
    Deprecated feed
    There will be at least 30 days advance notice before a feed is deprecated and again before it is removed entirely. We may have multiple deprecated feed versions available at the same time.

Users may reference a specific version of a feed. If a version is not specified, the production version will be used.

About Feed Versions

Each feed revision is assigned a unique feed version number. These version numbers represent major.minor.bugfix changes.

An increment in the “major” version number may include backward incompatibile changes. These can include changing available formats, or available data within a given format. Upgrading software to use the latest major feed revision is strongly recommended.

An increment in the “minor” version number will not include backward incompatible changes. These changes can include making new data and/or formats available. These changes can also include reformatting existing data so long as the format still conforms to the indicated specification. Upgrading software to use the latest minor feed revision is optional.

An increment in the “bugfix” version number will not include backward incompatible changes. These changes are generally to address issues that have been noticed in the existing feed formats. Upgrading software to use the latest bug fix revision is not required unless your software had been modified to use the invalid feed format previously available.

Each major.minor feed version will exist and proceed through the feed life cycle independently. As these feed versions proceed from “preview” to “production” to “deprecated” you will be able to manually specify a particular feed version to compare differences between revisions.

Each bugfix feed version will silently patch its parent major.minor version as it becomes available. There is no option to use an old bugfix version of a feed.

Available Feed Versions

Available feed versions are listed below. If a specific feed format is specified in requests, that format will always be returned so long as it remains available regardless of where that format is in its life cycle. If no specific format is specified, whichever format is currently considered the “production” format will be returned.

Preview Versions

No feed format is currently in “preview” status.

Production Version

Deprecated Versions