| status | accepted |
|---|---|
| date | 2026-10-15 |
| deciders | maintainer |
Spec #180 and Desk #404 separate artifact identity/version from document format, mutable draft revisions and digest identity. Packs already have an exact three-component grammar. Dialects' future artifact identity remains a shared contract decision. Clients need deterministic arithmetic without a different numeric parser in every editor or language-model prompt.
Add artifact version --base <x.y.z> [--candidate <x.y.z>] and the read-only MCP
tool get_artifact_version_options. Return all three bump choices, optionally
with the candidate's numeric relationship to the base. The report scope is
version-arithmetic; compatibilityChecked is always false. No operation selects
a bump, writes a document, reads a project, resolves a format or reserves an
identity. This does not add a new dialect format or change a released schema.
Use the Core pack grammar without suffixes or leading zeroes, exact arithmetic for components, and numeric comparison by component. Bound each input to 256 ASCII bytes. Refuse a base if any proposed next version would exceed that bound; every returned choice fits the version grammar and input byte bound. A subsequent bump may be refused if its own choices would exceed the bound. This is an operation resource bound, not a change to Core's schema grammar. Reports for invalid inputs contain no successful base, choices or comparison. CLI and MCP have the same structured report apart from command name. Invalid values exit 1; CLI invocation errors retain the existing invocation status. The public report uses the existing output envelope/version.
The client chooses a bump under its publication policy. Runner owns durable job usage and frozen releases. Desk's authoritative save/publish boundary enforces application policy, optimistic concurrency, approvals and exact checked bytes. A read-only arithmetic result is neither evidence of unused identity nor a grant to write. Plan may inspect choices without transitioning to execution.
Spec owns portable identity, version grammar, canonicalization and immutability. The shared contract proposal must land before a writer emits a changed Dialect format. First-job promotion or post-use bump rules are application policy; Runtime must not infer them from local state or fabricate compatibility findings.
Tests cover exact carry and ordering beyond floating-point precision, malformed and oversized inputs, whole-report refusal, missing/null/duplicate/case-variant arguments, CLI/MCP parity, closed discovery schemas and absence of project access. The new tool is additive and read-only; no dependency was added.
Material-decision impact: public-surface, documented-claim. Recorded review by a model from a different drafting vendor and maintainer dispositions are required before merge under this directory's README. This local implementation is not a released contract and has not been merged or installed.