[brandur]

I wonder if they might be amenable on that one. (If any GitHub staff is reading this.)

The proposed scheme is fairly similar to Stripe's, and although Stripe mainly uses the `Stripe-Version` header for versioning, its API has also always allowed you to alternatively send a `?_stripe_version=<version>` query parameter which it'll respect.

Stripe's API implementation definitely had its share of legacy cruft that added up and made things more difficult to maintain, but out of all of it, I don't remember having to support that alternative `_stripe_version` parameter ever really being a maintenance headache. The leading underscore made sure that even as the API expanded, it never accidentally collided with parameters on any other endpoint.

[timrogers]

Author here. I think this is an interesting suggestion, and one we'll have a chat about internally.

I definitely see the benefit of being able to easily hit the URL from a browser - although I think it's probably only relevant for unauthenticated GET requests.

[nerdile]

It's also relevant to authenticated GET requests. See also: how VSSPS, ARM do it.

[onionisafruit]

Old github would have been amenable. Current github has to convince a product manager who barely knows what an api is.

[prepend]

This definitely seems like a “current GitHub” decision where some project manager chain signed off after being “trained” on the benefits. It has a very Microsoft feel of a technically correct if everything goes right (eg, windows registry) but overly complicated and not something that would survive an open source dev review.

That being said, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just eventually these straws will add up to something really bad.