Versioning and the fb tag

Pyric has its own semver. Firebase compatibility is a separate claim, made by an npm dist-tag:

npm install pyric@fb12.13

fb<major>.<minor> points at the newest pyric release whose conformance gates passed against that line of Firebase. It means “conformance-tested against Firebase 12.13” — not “equal to” and not “full parity.” The tag is a statement about what was tested, not about how much matched.

Three rules govern it:

• It is machine-issued. The tag moves only when the release script runs compat:check against the pinned Firebase version and it comes back green. Nobody moves it by hand because they believe pyric is ready.
• It tracks major.minor lines, never patches. There is no fb12.13.1. Old fb tags are never deleted or moved backward, so an install pinned to an older line stays reproducible.
• It links to numbers, not a slogan. The claim behind the tag is inspectable on the conformance scoreboard: public runtime surface, public type surface, and fidelity of tracked behavior, per service. “Tested against” is a link, never a vibe.

The same tested-against version appears everywhere a user forms an impression: the README badge, the npm description, pyric --version, and the docs header.

Today: Firebase’s latest is 12.16.0, pyric’s pinned conformance version is 12.13.0, so the tag is fb12.13. A fb tag can point at an alpha release — compatibility and stability are separate claims, and alpha, latest, and fb12.13 can all resolve to the same publish, each making its own.

Bumping the pinned Firebase version re-snapshots the upstream surface; the diff is the worklist, and the new line’s tag appears only when compat:check passes against the new pin.