A fork’s first stable release, read carefully

A fork six weeks old is a promise; a fork with a stable release and a governance model is a slightly larger promise.

what was actually checked, rather than assumed:

  governance      a foundation, with named member
                  organisations. real.
  compatibility   protocol-compatible with the version
                  we run. verified by pointing our
                  integration tests at it for a week.
  packaging       distribution packages exist; the
                  container image is official.
  the client
  libraries       ours works unchanged. the one we do
                  not use has a fork of its own.

decision: still not migrating. but the option is real,
which it was not in March.

The difference between March and May is that the migration is now a boring afternoon rather than a bet, and that is worth establishing before it is needed rather than during. Running the integration suite against it for a week cost nothing and turned an assumption about compatibility into a measurement.