specification: API Commons Lifecycle
specificationVersion: '0.1'
provider: Victoria University of Wellington
providerId: victoria-university-of-wellington
generated: '2026-08-30'
method: derived
probe_date: '2026-08-30'
probe_note: >-
  Written by API Evangelist from live, unauthenticated probes. Every status code and payload
  quoted below was observed on the date above; nothing here was published by the institution.
source: live probes and public repository history, 2026-08-30
description: >-
  Lifecycle and change-management posture. Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington
  publishes no API versioning policy, no deprecation policy, no changelog and no status page for any
  interface it operates. Nothing below is a policy the institution states; it is what the evidence
  shows.
signals:
- surface: Website Global Object
  operator: institution
  versioning: none
  detail: >-
    No version segment in the path, no version field in the payload, no media-type versioning. The
    response carries Last-Modified "Wed, 10 Apr 2024 21:22:16 GMT" — the configuration has been
    stable for roughly two years — served through Cloudflare and Fastly with cf-cache-status
    DYNAMIC. Undocumented and unversioned: it may change or be withdrawn without notice, and any
    consumer should treat it as such.
- surface: Institutional repository (self-hosted DSpace)
  operator: institution
  versioning: platform
  detail: >-
    The repository reports its own software version in the REST root — dspaceVersion "DSpace 7.6.7"
    — which is the only place in this institution's entire footprint where a machine-readable
    version string is served at all. That version is the platform's, not an interface contract the
    university maintains: the university publishes no versioning policy, no deprecation notice and
    no changelog for the endpoint, and an upgrade of the underlying DSpace would change the REST
    surface without any announcement from the institution. The OAI-PMH interface is the stable one
    by standard rather than by policy — protocolVersion 2.0, deletedRecord "transient",
    granularity YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ — and `transient` is itself a lifecycle statement worth
    reading: the repository does not guarantee that a deletion, once reported, will keep being
    reported to harvesters.
- surface: Shibboleth Identity Provider
  operator: institution
  versioning: standard
  detail: >-
    Versioning is the SAML 2.0 protocol's, not the institution's. Federation change management is
    handled by Tuakiri, which has carried this entity since 2012-06-26 and republishes it in a
    signed aggregate. That is a fourteen-year continuous registration and is the strongest
    lifecycle signal the institution has.
- surface: Public code
  operator: institution
  versioning: repository
  detail: >-
    Three GitHub organisations. github.com/victoriauniversity (5 public repos, UI kit and web
    toolkit; most recent activity 2026-08-06). github.com/VUW-Library (3 repos; last activity
    2022-11-01, including an httpd proxy the library wrote for its own Figshare OAI-PMH set).
    github.com/vuw-research-computing (19 repos, actively maintained; raapoi-tools updated
    2026-08-28) supporting the Rāpoi HPC cluster. Only the research-computing org is currently
    active.
- surface: Course catalogue
  operator: institution
  versioning: academic-year
  detail: >-
    Course pages are versioned by academic year in the URL (/courses/<subject>/<code>/<year>), and
    sitemap-courses.xml enumerates 12,160 course-year URLs. This is a machine-readable catalogue
    with a real versioning convention, delivered as HTML plus schema.org JSON-LD rather than as an
    API.
status_page: none
deprecation_policy: none
changelog: none