Manifest version incompatibility

[fcasson]

My manifest files look like this

>head manifest.yaml
version: 1
alias: some/alias
metadata:
- values:
    workflow:
      name: jintrac-imas
      repo: https://git.ccfe.ac.uk:jintrac/jintrac
      commit: 519ad9c1d7c814ed18efcd20c385efbf05b771b5

With version 0.13.0, we now get warnings like this

raise InvalidManifest(f"Unknown manifest version {version}.")
simdb.cli.manifest.InvalidManifest: Unknown manifest version 1.
warning: no version given in manifest, assuming version 2

Renaming the key from version: 1 to manifest_version: 1 seems to help. But the whole point of a format version for this file is to maintain back compatibility. So if you want to rename the version field (why??), then version 1 (or even 0) should be assumed if none other is found? The version field was added in version 1 and should be mandatory for all following versions.

In general, changes like this cause downstream cascades of work to update scripts. There are several deployments already in production! When can we release version 1.0.0 and get a stable client API ? Can we add tests which check compatibility of new releases with existing use cases?

[deepakmaroo]

The old version of the manifest does not support evolving needs—such as new data types or additional parameters—which makes future expansions challenging without introducing breaking changes. In contrast, version 2 offers better extensibility, is more structured and feature-rich, and is closely aligned with the data dictionary and validation schema on the server side.

We understand your concerns and will continue to consider backward compatibility wherever necessary.