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Version

Facts that apply across a scope are definitions in RIDDL, not metadata options — the same principle that makes author a definition. A version is one of those.

A version's component is either a name or a natural number, never both:

version Garibaldi
version 4

Organizations routinely name their releases — Ubuntu's "Jammy Jellyfish", the Android desserts — so both forms are first class and may be mixed freely across scopes. The name uses the ordinary identifier production rather than a quoted string, so a composed coordinate can never contain characters a generator would have to sanitize.

Composition

A definition's precise version is composed from the versions its ancestors declare, root to leaf, joined with .:

domain Garibaldi is {
  version Garibaldi
  context Ordering is {
    version 4
    entity Order is {
      version 3
    }
  }
}

The Order entity's composed version is Garibaldi.4.3.

A type, a message or a handler declares no version scope of its own, so it simply reports its container's coordinate. That is deliberate: types are notoriously hard to attach metadata to, and some have no body at all.

The missing-level rule

Only scopes that actually bear a version contribute a component. The same model with an unversioned context composes to Garibaldi.3.

This is what makes adoption incremental: version the domain first, refine inward later, and nothing breaks in between.

Where Versions May Be Declared

Nine scopes: Root, Module, Domain, and all six processors — Adaptor, Context, Entity, Projector, Repository and Streamlet.

A processor's messages form an API and therefore a contract, so a version has to be expressible per component. Saga and Function are vital definitions rather than processors, and are deliberately excluded.

Validation

A scope declaring more than one version is an Error, reported at the second declaration.

version as an identifier still works

Making version a keyword does not break models that use it as a field or type name. Keywords are not excluded from the identifier production.

A Coordinate, Not a Semantic Version

The composed form looks like a semantic version but is a hierarchical coordinate. Do not read compatibility into it:

  • 3.1.6 → 3.2.1 says nothing whatever about breakage
  • Garibaldi.4.3 is not orderable against Jellyfish.1.1 at all
  • The coordinate's length varies with nesting depth, so comparison must be component-wise

A generator targeting an ecosystem that demands semver needs an explicit mapping rule; it cannot simply pass the coordinate through.

Copyright is the other scope-wide leaf definition, and it behaves deliberately differently: a version composes a coordinate from every versioned ancestor, whereas a copyright does not accumulate at all — the applicable notice is simply the nearest one.

Occurs In

Contains

Nothing — it is a leaf definition.