reusable pathitems

[qianlong]

Path item object has a $ref field for referencing an existing path item, however there is no place for holding path items in components. I don't know the correct way to use $ref in a path, but it seems like I should referring to a path item defined for another path?
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

I saw this topic was discussed in TSC Meeting - January 16th 2020, were any decisions made?

[MikeRalphson]

Because of the lack of a reusable component for pathItems in OAS 3.0 (and 2.0) the $ref property must (to be useful) point to an external resource / document.

See https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/pull/1964/files for an open PR attempting to clarify this distinction.

We ran out of time to discuss the paths object being made optional and reusable pathItems in components last week, but it is likely to come up again for this week.

[adamreisnz]

Keen to hear what the current recommendations and best practices are for storing paths externally and referencing them, in order to keep the spec in manageable chunks.

[lornajane]

As of OpenAPI 3.1, [PathItems can be defined in the components section](https://spec.openapis.org/oas/latest.html#componentsObject and referred to there. I think this answers the original question.