1. Introduction

Telemachus is currently maintained by a single author. Governance is deliberately lightweight — no committees, no formal voting, no blocking review process. This will evolve if external contributors join.

This specification supersedes RFC-0011 (Versioning and Governance Policy).

2. Versioning

Telemachus uses pragmatic version numbering:

2.1 Version Bumping Rules

• Major (0.x → 1.0): breaking schema changes, public release milestone
• Minor (0.7 → 0.8): new columns, new manifest fields, new adapters
• Patch (0.8.0 → 0.8.1): bug fixes, documentation, no schema change

2.2 Current Status

Pre-1.0: the specification is evolving. No backwards compatibility guarantee between minor versions. After 1.0, deprecated fields remain valid for at least one minor release.

graph LR
    V01["v0.1\nOct 2025\nJSON records\n(superseded)"]
    V07["v0.7\nMar 2026\nRecord format + CarrierState\n(RFC-0013)"]
    V08["v0.8\nApr 2026\nManifest + consolidated SPECs\n(current)"]
    V10["v1.0\nTarget\nStable public release\n+ external validation"]

    V01 --> V07 --> V08 -.-> V10

    style V01 fill:#e0e0e0,stroke:#424242
    style V07 fill:#fff9c4,stroke:#f9a825
    style V08 fill:#e8f5e9,stroke:#2e7d32
    style V10 fill:#e3f2fd,stroke:#1565c0

3. Specification Lifecycle

4. Decision Making (Solo Mode)

While the project has a single maintainer:

1. Decisions are documented in the relevant SPEC or in the ROADMAP journal (§5 of the deeptech ROADMAP).
2. No formal RFC review period — specs can move from Draft to Implemented in a single session.
3. External feedback welcome but not blocking. When Brice Adriano (or another external reviewer) is available, a review pass is recommended before tagging 1.0.
4. Version bumps happen when coherent — not on a fixed schedule, not on every commit.

4.1 Transition to Multi-Contributor

When external contributors join:

• Introduce PR-based review for spec changes
• Require at least one reviewer for schema-breaking changes
• Maintain a CHANGELOG linking changes to specs

5. IP and Publication Rules

5.1 Channel Separation

5.2 Golden Rule

The spec describes what columns exist and what they mean — never how to compute derived values. Processing methods and calibration algorithms are implementation-specific and not part of this spec.

6. Release Checklist

Before tagging a release:

• All SPECs reflect current implementation
• telemachus-py tests pass
• At least one adapter produces a valid dataset
• tele validate CLI works on the produced dataset
• CHANGELOG updated
• Git tag created (v0.8.0)
• Zenodo DOI minted (for significant releases)

7. References

• Superseded: RFC-0011 (Versioning and Governance Policy)
• Related: SPEC-01 (Format), SPEC-02 (Manifest), SPEC-03 (Tooling)

End of SPEC-04.