Compatibility

What ci-parity keeps stable between releases, what may change, and how a change is announced. It follows semantic versioning.

Before 1.0

Until v1.0.0, a minor release may still change anything on this page; the changelog lists every change. From 1.0, the promises below hold.

Stable

Changing any of these needs a new major version:

Rules: the IDs P001 to P005, their names, their severities, and the wording of their messages. People search for messages, so a message only changes with a major version.
Configuration: every key in .ci-parity.yml, its meaning and its default. The config schema describes them.
Baseline: the file format, version 1, and its model: a count per workflow that tolerates that many inline-tool findings and only goes down.
Output: the JSON format (its version, keys and value types, described by the output schema), the SARIF format (rule IDs, levels, suppressions, fingerprints and helpUri pattern), and the github format’s workflow commands.
Command line: the commands check, baseline, fix and version, their flags, and the exit codes.
GitHub Action: the inputs and outputs, and the v<major> tag following the newest release of that major version.

Not covered

These can change in any release:

The text format’s spacing and layout. Use --format json to parse results.
Which task a suggestion names when several tasks run the same command.
New findings. A new rule, a new runner, or a tool added to the built-in list can report steps that passed before; this arrives in a minor release, and the changelog says so.
Anything under internal/. ci-parity is a command and an action; it has no Go API.

Deprecation

A config key, flag or action input that will be removed is first deprecated for at least one minor release: it keeps working, ci-parity prints a warning on stderr naming its replacement, and the changelog lists it. It is removed only in the next major release.

Platforms

Release binaries are built for linux, darwin and windows, each on amd64 and arm64. CI runs every test on Linux, macOS and Windows, and the action’s release download on all three; output is the same on each.