Strict versioning and relationships

[dselman]

Discussion 🗣

Given these namespaces:

namespace person@1.0.0

concept Person identified by name {
   o String name
}

And:

namespace car@1.0.0
import person@1.0.0.Person

concept Car {
   --> Person owner
}

Any change to the person namespace should cause a change to the car namespace, even though the Car concept only contains a relationship to Person (the fully-qualified type name plus an identifier).

Context

Intuitively it feels like we are being too strict in this case. We know that the Car has a relationship to a Person but the relationship encodes the version number of the Person as well as the identifier.

Contrast with something like this:

namespace car@1.0.0

scalar Relationship extends String regex="resource://person@1.0.0#.*"

concept Car {
   o Relationship owner
}

At runtime we have the same enforcement of relationship, but there is no version dependency between the models, and we cannot statically determine that the Car concept references the Person concept.

Detailed Description

It is not clear what the best answer is here... Perhaps supporting both (as we do now) is the right thing?

[github-actions]

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