Hey all, it appears we missed an item in our 3.0 deprecations list and we should clear this up.
We have as of yet failed to capture consensus here about the deprecation of the _update endpoint. I think we *have* consensus here, but we didn’t make it stick in writing. To recap: the _update endpoint was added to allow arbitrary data to be POSTed to CouchDB and for developers to take whatever and turn that into a JSON document that then gets stored into CouchDB. Initially, this was added so we can process HTML Form submits. With the advent of XHR/fetch in browsers, this is no longer necessary. Another aim at the time was allowing legacy data systems that e.g. send XML via HTTP to configurable URLs to directly integrate with CouchDB. This is still a valid use-case, but easily enough worked around. There is also a constant level of confusion with the similarly named validate_doc_update feature, which enforces access control and schema conformity on all document writes. There is no proposal to deprecate this feature at this point and the _update endpoint and functionality are fully distinct from validate_doc_update. _update is the logical reverse of a _show and we already have deprecated that. It follows that we also deprecate _update for the same reasons (which I’m not going to rehash here for the 400th time). Since this is an API deprecation as per our bylaws[1], please cast your votes (or abstain to agree, as per lazy-consensus). Best Jan “XML, in this economy?” Lehnardt — [1]: https://couchdb.apache.org/bylaws.html#api
